the ultimate in waste disposal

USC prides itself on its sustainability initiatives, but here's one object that I would not wish to see recycled in any size, shape or form.

a yellow wall

... on my way home: corner of Benton and Temple.  I think it may be the police station.  It is very yellow - but how would one find words for its yellowness?  We were talking about yellow in my grad class today - in relation to 1880s and 1890s poetry, Mona Caird's "The Yellow Drawing Room," and various other things, including Richard Jefferies' wonderful essay "Nature and Books," in which he asks "What is the colour of the dandelion?" (but you know that, if you've heard me talk about dandelions at any point over the past few years ...); talks about the inadequacy of color terms to sum up dandelions, and speculates 

    Would it be possible to build up a fresh system of colour language by means of natural             objects? Could we say pine-wood green, larch green, spruce green, wasp yellow, humble-        bee amber? And there are fungi that have marked tints, but the Latin names of these agarics      are not pleasant. Butterfly blue—but there are several varieties; and this plan is interfered         with by two things: first, that almost every single item of nature, however minute, has got a      distinctly different colour, so that the dictionary of tints would be immense; and next, so         very few would know the object itself that the colour attached to it would have no                     meaning...

by which point one finds oneself in the middle of a Sherwin-Williams paint chart.  

If you look carefully, there's a quite different pale primrose yellow fence, beyond.

I do find color quite irresistible as a subject, but not all of my grad students (all in English) seem quite as gripped - and today's revelation - today's gloomy revelation - was that five out of the six of them find poetry "difficult," and shy away from it wherever possible, and so my on the spot compare/contrast between Arthur Symons' "Nora on the Pavement" and Sarojini Nadu's "Indian Dancers" was, shall we say, lost on them ...

 

airport art and Arizona clouds

I really like Madison, but it's certainly not the easiest place to get to from LA ... That being said, I deliberately drove back cross-country - no interstate, or only a little - to Milwaukee airport, to get a fix of mid-west late summer/early fall: all tall corn, and red barns, and apples.  I only saw the lake from the air, but the airport wanted to celebrate it, clearly: this is Submerged Vessels by Dennis Oppenheim.  In all truthfulness, it looks as though the non-working moving walkway has been sliced up and arranged in geometric shapes ...

The flight back was via Phoenix: here are some Arizona clouds.  Our pilot did a great job avoiding the bumps.

 

Aldo Leopold's cabin

Aldo Leopold's cabin: this was the retreat for Leopold and his family, on eighty acres that he tried to reclaim and conserve - planting innumerable trees - and where, of course, he wrote the essays that became one of the finest volumes of American environmental/nature writing, A Sand County Almanac.  It's about an hour's drive west of Madison: green turning into fall.

Also some very strange bugs - strange to me, anyway - the Boxelder Bug: totally common signs of fall to Wisconsin residents, apparently, but decidedly like something out of sci-fi.

Here's a gaggle of Vcologians inside the hut;

and here's some land, being cleared and replanted with white oaks - I think.  The Wisconsin river is just beyond there ...

There are many wonderful aspects of coming to Vcologies (not the least, this evening, have more excellent sushi than I could think possible), but one of the best is our nature outings ...

 

some random bits of Madison, and the vicissitudes of memory

Here's the central staircase in my hotel - a very definitely dated 1947 style, but perfectly so.

Followed, of course, by a Badger; the sunset from my room; and the State Capitol at night.  I remember visiting that in around 1989, and remember its magnificent interior well.  At least, I think I do.  The last time I was in Madison was later September in 2012, for an excellent NAVSA conference, and I stayed in a B&B on the other lake, walking over to this side for the conference itself.

Or so I thought - until someone told me that NAVSA was held, indeed, on that other lake.  So where over here, I wondered, did I stay?  This is where both keeping this blog, and not deleting personal emails, comes in handy.  Ummmmm: I stayed in this very same hotel.  I have absolutely zero memory of this.  I don't know what to do with this fact.  I even wrote a friend that it was weirdly dated in style ... I know the actual room I'm staying in is somewhat generic, apart from the view - but you'd think that I'd have had, perhaps, a very small frisson of recognition, at some point?

view over Lake Mendota

aka Madison, Wisconsin.  It has taken me SO LONG to get here I feel as though I might as well have flown to Europe.  The crowning horror was the drive from Milwaukee, down what ought to be a fast interstate - but the interstate is being Resurfaced (and indeed will be closed when it comes to my return trip), and this meant endless slow slow bumping along with my rental wheels half on fresh tar, half on the rumble strip.  I hope I'm vaguely compos mentis tomorrow ...

taking it for granted?

Time was, when I was absolutely transfixed by the photographic possibilities of our reflecting pool on campus.  Today, walking past it - I realized that I can't really claim to have been seeing it for an age.  So this is making amends, rather boring image though it is - another day when I had my head firmly down, and I don't think that my computer keyboard makes for anything more compelling.

 

Bah

It was a bit of a Bah kind of a day - the students, doubtless facing multiple mid-terms (including the one I'm setting them on Thursday) were in something of a slump, or maybe just anxious about whatever questions I'll be setting them - including multiple choice questions that are so easy that they ought to make an easy ten points for everyone.  Hmmmm.  We'll see.  This inscription, anyway, was readily visible under the 10 freeway going home: very tidy.  Did they have a ladder?

 

our watery lady of ...

Another day, another junction box ... this time with a rather fine - well, I thought, stopped at lights as I was driving past it, that she was a saint, but now that I have the opportunity to look properly, I think perhaps she's a mermaid: she certainly has an octopus and several fishies behind her.  So either she's getting people ready for the Rapture tomorrow; or we're being invited to pray for the Dodgers (surely that blue is Dodgers blue?); or - well, sometimes a mermaid is just a mermaid.

 

Woof!

More Glendale street art - a junction box, spotted on the way to Whole Foods this morning.  Woof - or rather, looking at the speech coming out of the little Pomeranian's mouth, Yip Yip.  It seemed very apposite, since I already had dogs on my mind today: I'd looked out of my study window earlier and seen what looked like a small bear down the garden: it wasn't, and of course I really knew that from the start, but it was certainly medium sized and black and woolly.  This image is actually cropped from some Ring camera footage.  By the time I'd gone out to introduce myself, he'd disappeared, or rather gone back next door, since he - Billy Ray Valentine, to be exact - belongs to our newish neighbors.  He's a cockapoo.  So I hope they've found where he was getting through, and blocked it - because I worry he could get out into the wilds of Griffith Park from our yard (when we had the back fence put in, we made a specially designed entrance/exit for all the critters like raccoons and possums and of course bobcats - not that they can't climb, but we might as well make it easy for them).  So - woof.  BRV has the most magnificent ears.

 

morning gs

I know you wanted a morning glory update - but who knows how the ones in New Mexico are doing (I'm hoping well enough - there's been enough rain to keep them going, I think).  But these are Los Angeles ones, growing up the side of our garage wall near our front door, and I really don't know where they came from.  They might have hitched a ride with the plants I brought back from NM, or they may just be random volunteers, a product of poop from a passing bird.  I planted a whole lot of Grandpa Ott seeds out back several years back - before our yard was remade - and none of them ever sprouted - and in any case, this pretty flower isn't deep purple.  All the same, it's a very welcome enigma.

 

the thing with feathers

To Glendale this evening to see The History of Sound - much recommended if you want to feel really weepy - although the locations were a little off ... it's hard to make New Jersey look and feel like Maine, Kentucky, and the British countryside.  Oh, and Tarquinia substituted for Rome.  But the ethnomusicology/collecting folk songs in the early twentieth century was well done, in a calculated-nostalgia way.  Hope, however ... not much on show.  The feathers had molted.  And hope of an excellent Indian dinner at the All India restaurant on Brand was - defeated.  Not that it was bad, but one could find something better on Wimbledon Broadway, and if this is (as advertised) the best Indian food in LA county ... well, no, it can't be.  At least I managed to get back to see Clayton Kershaw pitch his final regular season innings ... 

 

the horrors of the weekly trash pick-up

The horror! The horror!  Early every Thursday morning, the bangs, the crashes, the huge trucks moving up the street - three different ones, at slightly different times - for three different bins.  The cats are always mesmerized - perhaps fascinated, rather than terrified, but they certainly don't want these mechanical monsters to come a centimeter closer to our kitchen.

 

frayed

In my office, further evidence of my love of sea-green, and further evidence, too, of the reluctance I have to get rid of things that I still love aesthetically - even when they've gone past the point of being worn, and have passed over into - well, "shabby" was the word of my childhood, but I don't feel that I've heard it so much in recent decades, except in the faux-aged sense of "shabby chic."  These cushions (why the Americans call them "pillows" I don't know, since one doesn't put one's head on them) came from Casa in Santa Fe (a sad Covid casualty as a store) around 2001. Some became office cushions; some are in the Santa Fe house; all are made of silk that has split and striated and faded in parts.  They are ... disintegrating.  I could, I suppose - I probably will, at some point - cut off all the pretty little bobbles (and use them for what??) - but I am so reluctant to wave farewell to their beautiful colors, however unrealistic  this attachment may be in the long - the medium - even the short term.

 

leaves, curves

What felt like a long day teaching, meeting with students, etc - and trying to finish a paper that should have been uploaded by er er yesterday - thankfully, I'm on the final footnote stage, but I wouldn't mind putting down my computer for the evening ... Luckily I'm still capable of looking round me at school and seeing random bits of beauty, etc, even if it's a long way from Thomas Cole's Essay on Landscape - which, since it's one of my favorite bits of art wrtiting, hovering somewhere between a manifesto and a celebration, I always love.

 

bay leaves in a bowl

The bay leaves are from our bay tree; the bowl has been with me for ever: I believe it (and a much smaller sibling) came from a shop on the Cowley Road, in Oxford, that for a few years had some really great crafts.  This is actually made of papier maché, painted a deep deep green with underlying gold - rather like Whistler's Peacock Room.  It's enough to make me start burnishing my fantasies of making papier maché bowls and decorating them, although why I think I could turn out anything as beautiful as this beats me ...

 

Children of Gaza

Last week, by the reservoir, the Migration is Beautiful butterfly poster.  Today, a sunflower heart - not celebrating Ukraine, but reminding us of the cruelty, the horrors, the starvation being experienced by children in Gaza.  

 

already?

Indeed, this is the second week that there have been pumpkins at the Silver Lake Whole Foods: this week the offerings have moved from Large to Huge.  I completely refuse to buy a pumpkin or three for our front steps until it's October (mind you, the choice starts to decline by then ...).  But in any case, the raccoons will doubtless regard them as an enormous snack.  Seasonal creep ... I saw that the shop at the Huntington yesterday was full of Halloween decorations, and next door to the Glendale Best Buy there's a huge store called Kreepy Halloween.  I mistrust all those 1930s style names that begin with Ks ...

 

an exquisite hibiscus

Isn't she beautiful?  This is Alyogyne Ruth Bancroft, developed at the Ruth Bancroft Gardens - I looked them up, excitedly, and they look like a great place to visit,  but unfortunately are just to the east of San Francisco, so not exactly convenient.  She's a hybrid, grown from two native Australian hibscus (hibisca? hibicuses?) and was a wonderful gift from a newly minted English creative writing PhD at the end of last semester, together with some mallows (the writer was moving east, to a climate inhospitable to such plants).  I wasn't at all sure that she'd make it (the plant, that is, not the increasingly successful writer) - she's still in a huge pot, though, and seems, after some initial drooping and us cutting her right, right back, to be happy and flowering.  I've tried ... but it's impossible to capture in a photograph the translucent pale mauve in a way that conveys how delicate and magical she is: I'm just going to have to hope for the right shaft of light, at some point.

 

iconic

It's all too easy to forget that where one lives contains elements of the iconic - here's the Griffith Park Observatory, just under a mile and a half west of us - and very visible from this morning's traffic as I headed off to have my hair done (and is it weird to have a male undergrad complement one, after class, on one's hair?  Maybe not, since he's obviously a hair-conscious guy - shaved sides, and then the top an Afro that looks like a flying saucer, with blond edges - much more striking, I hasten to add, than my own).

Icons are on my mind, since we were having a nineteenth century visual culture day, with each of six groups (it's a class more or less of twenty nine) researching and presenting on the context of six icons/images containing them - Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, the Flag, the American Eagle (and the fact that rather mysteriously, the Quail is California's state bird - I couldn't have told you that), the Liberty Cap, and Columbia (so also a chance to talk about cartoons and how they function, Peale's Museum, Samuel Jennings, and, inevitably, John Gast.  So have any of you picked up on where Gast's American Progress has appeared recently? I asked.  Silence.  The Department of Homeland Security's website.  That loud clicking sound?  It was the sound of twenty six (not everyone could make class) jaws dropping (and then I posted an article from the LA Times about this to our Brightspace site).  

And yes, amazingly, we managed all this in our designated 100 minutes.

 

an unexpected lily

I came back after a long long day - mostly meetings, at which it was interesting to compare the mildly different versions of the all chairs meetings coming out of English and out of Art History: what they had in common was gloom about impending staff cuts coupled with anger at the lack of news, the lack of transparency, the lack of any real knowledge of budgetary figures.  Different people seemed to have heard different things about this year's graduate admissions.  Yes! there will be graduate admissions!  Yes, but these will be radically slashed when it comes to admissions numbers (it might be hard to slash Art History by all that much, given that we had three slots this year, and because of a very last minute defection only two ended up coming). If they carry on slashing, however, we won't have the TA numbers we need. And so on.  It's impossible to plan very far ahead at all.

So it was good to come home to a lily in a watering can, doubtless placed there by Sid, our most regular gardener.  It looks like one of the ones that usually blooms in the early spring - she must have damaged it somehow, or it became bent in watering: a strange color and texture, like a not particularly healthy tongue.

 

food in boxes

Not the best specimen of broccoli.  Indeed, it's looking remarkably Dutch painting like here - a faint touch of yellowing memento mori, but perfectly edible - believe me, though, it wasn't.  It came in our weekly vegetable box (everything else looks fresh and fine), so I was about to report it for ageing, wilting, and limpness.  And indeed, I instantly had my refund.  But I always take a picture - long ago, one had to document one's complaint, and I always try to do so now, in the unlikely event of someone calling me out on it.

And yet ... the privilege of having a box delivered to one's door, and choosing its contents, and knowing that the money will gently be debited from one's bank account on a Sunday was very much brought home later, when Alice reported going to get her Covid shot from the USC pharmacy.  This was, indeed, advertising Covid shots for everyone earlier in the week.  When she turned up, she was told they weren't giving any - and to be sure, the website now only mentions flu.  But she initially encountered a long line.  Are you waiting for vaccinations? she asked.  No, replied a waiting student: it's the food pantry.  It's great that our university addresses student food insecurity with what seems to be a very well established, very well set up organization.  It's also deeply concerning that it's needed at all.

 

Gramsci's new device

When Grammy and Moth were at the vet's last week, she recommended that we get them an aluminum water fountain to encourage them to drink, and thus stay hydrated.  So here it is!  Gramsci has always loved running water (think: bathroom, taps) and so he was immediately fascinated; must have drunk his normal day's intake in about five minutes, and then stretched out on the floor in comfortable possession.

Moth has ignored it, steadfastly.

 

beauty, variegated

The Silverlake reservoir was looking particularly - well, beautiful today, and still, and early autumnal, despite the temperature still being in the high eighties (or it became so, a bit later).  Clearly, I'd stopped aching enough to be able to enjoy walking round it.  

And then, a little later, a further reminder of the complexities and multiplicities of beauty - and not, I take it, just in terms of monarch butterflies, however environmentally sound that might be as a sentiment, too ...

 

 

exercise

Believe me, post vaccines, today was not a day for exercise  Happily, luckily, I wasn't as wiped out as I usually am, and had no shivering in the night.  But I also had no energy - absolutely no energy - and all of me ached.  So there was absolutely no chance of me stretching those exercise bands, which stayed in their place, catching the morning sunlight on my study's banister.

I did, though, manage to stroll around the garden, trim the lavender bushes, and - look!  It was party time last night!  I saw two raccoons on our Ring cam who were ambling around our back steps, but it looks as though they were far more active further down the garden.  Cute little hand prints!  I was a bit surprised not to trip over a pile of empty beer cans: I'm sure they're that kind of raccoon.

 

grateful for ...

...being old enough to get a new Covid vaccine without having to persuade a doctor that I have some condition that makes me eligible for it ...

... living in California, which is happy to jab one's arm without question.  Indeed, CVS gives you a $10 voucher for having had a vaccine (or two, in my case - a flu shot went in the other arm) so long as you spend $20 in the store, which given one's regular need for shampoo, etc, is hardly a hardship.  If I were in New Mexico, it seems that at the moment one can't get a Covid shot at all - no matter what one's age - without a prescription.

Of course, in a few hours time I will doubtless be shaking and shivering and feeling terrible until 4.45 tomorrow afternoon, given how appallingly severely I respond to Covid shots, but it's worth it.

 

snake house

A really excellent snake, painted on the side of a somewhat dilapidated old house on Alvarado.  I think it's roughly a rainbow snake.  What I hadn't seen when I was taking the photo, but can see now, is the figure of a semi-human figure - or maybe with a mask? - underneath it, holding something that looks like a short version of a pole that a tightrope walker might carry.  This certainly adds to the surreal effect: it's like a Leonora Carrington painting.  And when I wound down the window to take it, the entire house was vibrating to the sound of a multitude of barking, yapping dogs.

 

comrades in adversity

Really, it wasn't too bad - apart from the moment when, having just left the house, Alice had to break hard to avoid a truck barrelling up the hill, and the carrying cases shot forwards from the rear seat (no cats hurt, only our nerves).  This was a trip to the vets: Gramsci needed a blood work up (in the spring he had a weirdly elevated liver count: we're waiting to learn if this was a one-off or not) and Moth had to check in after her urinary problems earlier this summer.  But of course, they are cats, and they hated the excursion.  Once we were in the examination room, Gramsci grew his biggest brush tail possible, and clambered onto my shoulder; Moth hunkered down in her carrier where, after being weighed, Grams decided that the safest option was to join her.

There were too many meetings, otherwise, today.

 

pushing back against AI

... not by me, though, but by some of our students.  I was really delighted to see this on a noticeboard on the stairs up to Art History today.  Who knew that we had an Ethical Tech club - and one that puts out hard hitting messages like this, too?  They don't say if the hypothetic bottle is made of plastic, or not - which would surely make things worse still.  This makes me proud of our students, though, and gives me just a dash of hope for the future.

 

a very handsome visitor

... sitting on a stalk of the rosebush by the front door.  On the other hand, its presence might explain why the rosebush is looking a little ... chewed.