lemons in the fog

It's not exactly thick fog - more like damp cloud.  It was certainly lightly precipitating when we went for a walk early this morning, and everything was gently blurred, as though one had developed cataracts overnight.  These lemons, on the next street, look as though this wasn't exactly what they'd bargained for.

 

a leaf

and a very fine leaf it is, too: a morning glory leaf outside our front door, with some strange lines and coloration and fading.  Sometimes I think one just doesn't look at individual leaves enough.  

 

a dandelion portrait

If I hadn't written a chapter on dandelions, I would never have learned what wonderful, resilient, beneficial plants they are: long roots that take moisture way into the ground (moisture that collects on those long leaves that have a gutter down their center for rain and dew and the residue from garden sprinklers to run down); early to bloom (although I'm not sure that applies in Southern California) so they're an early source of food for pollinators; invaluable as a biomonitor since they will flourish almost anywhere but those hardy roots will tell you how much heavy metal pollution there is in the soil.  And the leaves are edible, and are effective diuretics, and and and. And they're cheerful.  So don't dig them up, please.

 

the pièce de résistance

though the turkey was pretty good, too.

This tasted delicious: pumpkin cheesecake on a ginger snap/pecan base.  But I had all kinds of dreams for the top ... I painstakingly cut out a kind of large paper snowflake/star that fitted the cheesecake top, and gently gently pulsated icing sugar - that's confectioner's sugar, in the US - down over the pretty pattern, thinking I'd end up with a wonderfully designed top.  I carefully lifted off the stencil - and the sugar promptly dissolved into the cake, forming a thin transparent glaze.  I won't try that again: so much for misplaced culinary design ambition. So here's a smear of ricotta, some frozen raspberry crumbs, and a clementine slice.  

 

'twas the day before Thanksgiving

"A turkey? An Organic Turkey? An Organic HERITAGE turkey?  For ME?"  Well, not exactly, Gramsci.  We didn't go and stand in line outside McCalls for a turkey that we ordered back on November 2nd (!) just for you.  Indeed, we're not sure how much you like turkey.  However, we're looking forward to this, and to the pumpkin cheesecake that I carefully baked this afternoon ...

 

Tiles, continued

I mean, I'm just full of regret that they aren't opening a Mexican restaurant - or at the very least a teuila bar - next door: that would be very convenient ... 

 

next door has a make-over

The house next door has changed out its grass (good!) and rather nonedescript assortment of trees and bushes for some lavender, and other purple plants, and rose bushes, and some large blue pots, and a lot - a very large lot - of multicolored tiles.  This pic doesn't even show how they stretch down the front wall, and climb up the front steps, and round the windows: I'll save that for another time.  It's ... colorful.  Unmissable, even.  I thought that I was giving pride of place to golden sunlight falling on the mountains, but the apricot glow looks decidedly thickened by pollution.

 

homily of the day

This is an odd one, stenciled on the side of a transformer box overlooking the reservoir.  It's not, so far as I know, an obvious suicide spot: no tall buildings or bridges or cliffs, and if one was to clamber over the chain mesh fencing round the reservoir, then I'd have thought one would have to work fairly hard to drown oneself in the green and brackish still water.  Nor is it an obvious place for the depressed and despondent to be walking, anyway.  I did once, and tragically, see a heron that had been hit by a car on that part of the roadway - but it's not as though one could easily head off wandering into freeway traffic around here.  So I guess it's a generalist statement, and of course one agrees with its sentiments - but somehow it's not very uplifting or consolatory.

 

Los Angeles, Saturday

A sun-bleached hanging lobster (complete with plastic seaweed) might be a standard sight outside a seaside crab shack, say, but it was a little surprising on Pico.  Inevitably, it reminded me how mad I was at my mother for throwing out my own plastic lobster, begged from a fishmonger in Oxford Market, and taken by me on a pale blue ribbon to a Decadence party (I was, of course, Gerard de Nerval: yet another manifestation of my love of fancy dress parties ...).  Today was a day of catching up and running errands - such as taking the broken vacuum cleaner to the menders that was next door to the lobster.  May we also recommend John O'Groats of Pico, quite nearby, which is a cheerful and delicious traditional diner?

And then, coming back on Fountain, this extraordinary - almost Northern European - painted side to a ... a house, a small apartment block, some offices?

 

an energetic evening out

since it included much dancing, and indeed much yelling because of the music: but it was much fun (once we'd found our way in: the top pic is from our wandering entry through the car park.  The event was at Geffen Contemporary to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Cathy Opie's Dyke Deck - deck of cards, that is, not nautical.  Alice posed as a golfer for the first set - but I never managed to snag the image of her coming round in circulation on the screen.  Still, here's the group of original subjects being photographed on stage,

and here's Alice and Connie in front of one of the many poker tables.  We didn't play - I had a dim memory one of my grandmothers had taught me, but I think that was bridge.

Oh, and the dress was supposedly nineties themed.  OK for Alice, since she could wear the tee shirt she had on twenty five years ago: I was reduced to a floppy part-velvet skirt and heavy boots, and had horrible flash backs to going out to parties in, yes, the nineties.

 

graffiti on the way to work

A grey and gloomy day in Los Angeles, full of grading, teaching and admin.  Now it's raining.  So I give you some local graffiti, jusr for local color.

 

view from the dentist's

or the view from one of my dentists, at least, and I'm seriously hoping that this was the sign-off visit that it's been heralded as being, and that I never see it again, despite its magnificence.  This particular dentist is the surgeon who's been painstakingly replacing the implants that I had done over twenty years ago, and which mostly failed as a result of what was once state of the art surgery - well, not being state of the art any longer.  It has been long, and painful, and although this man's actual surgery is impeccable, his manner of treating my mouth has been like having someone rather roughly constructing an IKEA cabinet inside it.  But after much prodding, and tapping, and scanning, and X-raying today (and being inadvertently jabbed in the roof of my mouth by one of his assistants wielding a very sharp instrument, which Bled a Good Deal) - we have, in his words, reached the end of the road, in a good sense. So it's back to my wonderful regular dentist for the rest.  This called for some soft, gentle lunch: may I recommend the true ambrosia that is an Erewhon rice pudding?

I'll miss the view, though ...

 

heading home

This was the view when I left Taper Hall on campus this evening: I love the downtown skyscrapers just visible against the pink clouds.  It was a long, long day, of teaching but also of trying to give support to our office staff as they navigate the current tough situation (some of you will know all too well what I mean).  Then I picked up some mid-terms to grade: the kind of exam where you immediately read "This painting is Thomas Anshutz's Ironworkers Noontime from 1880 when slavery was in full force."  I mean - have their ears and eyes been shut for the whole semester?  So I was grateful for the beauty of the sky.

 

looking green

A gap in the rain! and you can see how green, already, everything is looking.  That's so different from this time last year, thank goodness - indeed, apparently it's been LA's wettest November on record.  I think we've had the last downpour of the day, but it looks as though there may be another round on Thursday.  And thank goodness, too, that the slope didn't wash away.  I threw down masses of poppy seeds for the spring before I left, so it'll be interesting to see where they ended up.

And for anyone following the subject matter of the last couple of days: yes, those square pale yellow boxes on the upper left are, indeed, beehives.  They belong to some neighbors, and I've never seen anyone tending to them - on the other hand, there are usually a very satisfactory number of bees buzzing around them.

 

National Gallery bees, and more

Of course, I did head off and look at pesticides and bees in the nineteenth century, and immediately found remedies to keep bees out of ripe fruit ...

and then, in the National Gallery today (reopened!  yay!) I found these, in a painting by Joseph Decker.

It was so wonderful to be able to take some details ready for class on Tuesday - like Church's Niagara, 

and from his El Río de Luz

and here's Elton John in 1851.

I'd never noticed the brass band in Homer's Home Sweet Home before.

A very smoky chimney in Whistler's Wapping,

and a Landseer in which some St Bernards are trying to lick a man back to life, his furry glove looking just like a paw.

Back in LA, now, and it's late ...

 

other people's bees

The paper that I gave today at the NAVSA conference was about bees and beehives - nineteenth century ones, but read through Wolfgang Buttress's The Hive and his Liverpool exhibition last year (I was so glad that I took as many pictures as I did).  It was a condensed version of my book's conclusion: having been asked some good questions, I can see that the conclusion itself may very well expand a little ... Earlier, much earlier in the day, what's more, I heard a paper about the children's nature writer Arabella Buckley, which included this double page on bees, and this gave me another source that I hadn't looked at - I'd wanted an example of bees in nature illustrations as attractive as this, and here, happily, it appeared - not in time for me to get it into my paper, but I was very grateful. So: bzzzzzzzz.

 

conference still life

Believe me, I've been very grateful for the fruit plate that was delivered to my room the first evening!  The grapes (there are even fewer now) were particularly good.  Conferences can be very busy!!  At least I've had time to finish my power point for tomorrow ... So many people to talk to!  Etc.  Exhausting, but NAVSA always has been one of my very favorite conferences: I just wish there weren't always so many papers that I want to hear overlapping each other ...

 

conference, fall

Coming from the west coast, one of the things that I most love about very many NAVSA conferences is getting a real taste of fall (yes, I know, next year we'll be in Pasadena, which won't be quite the same).  It was a glorious sunny day today - caught in panels, I barely saw it, alas, but did manage to wander into the hotel gardens during the afternoon break, and not just look around, but down into Rock Creek Park.

And here's our very own Anna Flinchbaugh, doing USC's Art History department proud, talking about women's embroidery workshops and collaborative work.

For anyone anxious for a Moth bulletin: she has tooth resorption - which basically means that that odontoclast cells have started to attack her teeth and replace dental material with inflammatory granulation tissue - that is, her teeth are crumbling from below.  So no wonder one broke ... it apparently would/could have happened at any time (I want to let Gramsci, rambunctious boy though he is, off the hook, here).  It's not certain, until she has dental imaging, how many others may be affected, too.  Poor Mothy.  She may have tooth ache - we don't know.  I feel for her: her dental problems are, in feline terms, as bad as mine (and probably proportionately just as expensive, too ...).  She'll certainly need extractions.

 

dawn, dusk

... a day largely recorded, seemingly, in vertical stripes.  Since I was up at 4 a.m. (for who knew what airline horrors awaited me? Answer: none), I am extremely sleepy, and grateful for the warm and hospitable and comfortable surroundings of the Omni Shoreham in DC (and glad to be staying here, too, without days of holding job interviews ahead of me, which has been my lot at various times in the past).  That seems like another lifetime.  On the other hand, it's a strange time to be in DC.  Will the Smithsonian museums open again before I leave, or not?  I'd been so looking forward ...

 

cacti

... on a junction box in Atwater Village.  An idyllic looking Veterans' Day view - before the rain rolls in later this week, and before today started to go in entirely the wrong direction, when we realised that our dear Moth had badly broken one of her lower canine [not a good name for a cat] teeth - probably yesterday, when she was being chased by Gramsci and banged into a table - which is now at right-angles to her jaw and sticking out.  She doesn't seem to be in pain ... She was seen this afternoon by her regular vet; goes in for a pre-surgery consultation on Thursday (by which time, planes permitting, I'll be out of town) - and then we'll see what needs doing.  Gramsci should be in the dog house, but instead of which he's sitting on my printer and gravely impeding me producing a conference paper to take with me.

 

the last rose of summer, sort of

... or rather: "the last rose of summer" sounds like a good heading for a post, but I doubt that this is indeed the case.  This isn't one of our own (when did we see "the last rose..."? Maybe May ...), of course, but the last of a bunch bought at Trader Joe's, and therefore probably Colombian.  On the other hand, the kind of light that it's catching on the kitchen window ledge is unequivocally autumnal, post clock change, pale.

And the semester is unequivocally both winding down and speeding up.  I have only two more grad classes to go (Thanksgiving week is a "research week," so far as they are concerned) - and I feel exhausted with the current iteration - one of those semesters where I wish I could start again, and a more basic level, since only one of the five (or six - one dropped) is, or is potentially, a Victorianist.  They are all Eng Lit students.  Today, I had to disabuse the idea that Michael Field was a man ("Oh - I wondered why the syllabus said 'Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper,' after the name,"); learned that none of them had read The Turn of the Screw; and gently pointed out that the Emperor Hadrian wasn't Greek.  (On the other hand, Antinous was, in that he was from Bythnia, only not Greek as in ...).  From which you'll gather that we were reading Olive Custance, too and generally wondering, in the context of people kissing marble statues, marble statues coming to life, Pygmalion, and all the rest of it, why so many late Victorians were so weird.  On the other hand, I was gloomily realizing that they haven't read enough to see quite how wacky they were ...

 

tinted window

We were on a walk round the 'hood - still embellished with pumpkins, though most of the skellies have gone now - and this suddenly caught my eye, on Amesbury.  I just love this to bits: it encapsulates, in the sum of its parts, why I like living here so much ...

 

autumn at the end of the garden

As I recounted yesterday, it was the fall planting and trimming season in the garden yesterday, so I went out intending to capture the fine results - and somehow took a little clutch of boring (if useful for documentary purposes) images.  So enjoy the view from the end of our garden, looking into Griffith Park, with (if you look closely) red berries, and a few yellow leaves on the red bud tree, and what I hope is a much happier lime tree: both the lime and the Meyer lemon were suffering badly (it turned out) from having nutrient-hungry, deep-rooted rosemary planted in the same pots.  Even if that was pretty, it was making them miserable.  It's a dank and misty night out there by now: just beyond our fence, there are currently coyotes yip-yipping away. Sometimes it's very hard (if one employs selective vision - turn your head to the right and you see Glendale) to believe that one lives in LA.

 

blooming

against the front wall of the house, and very prettily so, too.  Ah, said Max, our garden supremo: Black-Eyed Susan.  I didn't contradict him, but I was pretty certain this wasn't a Black-Eyed Susan - rudbeckia hirta.  I think of those plants as being like miniature sunflowers, or yellow daisies, and free-standing in the ground.  But I put this photo into Plantsnap, and lo and behold, it's thunbergia alata, also known as Black-Eyed Susan Vine, no relative - as its Latin name shows - of the other BES.  How confusing.

 

stacking

At school, we stack tables and chairs: these are all getting ready for the Trojan Family Weekend (for which, I gather, every parent has to pay $100 ... and they are emphatically not serving fancy food, although it looks as though cardinal and gold scarves were being dispensed and hung round lucky parental necks).  I think the main aim is that we win tomorrow's football game; that they think their offspring are having a wonderful time; and they give us some money.  I asked my class this afternoon how many had parents actually coming, and lots did.  I told them they should have brought them to class ... then they could have learned about all the controversial stuff we teach in universities ... "so ... what is happening with the sky in this painting? ..."

At home, and even more neatly, we stack cats.

 

jug

Another object that I've known all my life, and that's now taken up residence on my office window ledge.  Who knows what junk shop my parents found it in - or for all I know it had been in one family or the other.  Typically - typically for our family, that is - it has a handle that at one time was broken and mended (which has probably why it was a very affordable object in the first place).  But I always remember it as holding flowers from the garden - a couple of roses, almost certainly, and perhaps a stem or two of fuschia: its opening and lip made it very easy to make small arrangements in it.  It gives a decidedly Victorian cottage vibe to the autumnal leaves outside.

 

Milton marathon

I promise you that there were more people than appear here - a captive undergraduate class, by the look of it - at the English Department's nose to tail reading of Paradise Lost today.  And they were all older than the small guy to the right of this image, too - but I'm delighted he was getting full exposure to Milton at an early age.  Unfortunately I didn't arrive at the right time to get one of my favorite pieces - rather, a chunk of God rather laboriously and precisely explaining his position vis à vis Christ's role - just after the "sufficient to have stood but free to fall" section, which puts forward such a persuasive argument for free will.  What I'd never noticed before - and I guess that's because I've always tended to gallop through the abstract theological sections to get to some poetically richer lines - is how often Milton has his God say "I"?  Is this firm authority, or egotism?

It was good, anyway, to spend half an hour communing with Paradise Lost - thanks to Steven Minas for organizing this!

If I had a suitable image to accompany an account of this evening's triumphant election results, I would include - but these seem, indeed, such a victory for right feeling and for justice that I hope the spirit of Milton is in itself appropriate enough.

 

table lighting

For years and years, Cliff's Edge in Silverlake was our go-to place to eat - for special nights out; when we had people visiting from out of town.  And then came the pandemic, and it closed.  And the space was taken over by Bacari, which started off down by USC - and now has eight branches - and we somehow never went there, until tonight (probably because the one by SC is all indoors and impossibly noisy).  It was fine - both food and drink - but there was none of the old funky magic about it, alas ... 

 

a first!

My first American vote! (unless you count the Eldorado Water Board elections, in which I'm entitled to vote as a householder ...).   It's a momentous occasion - and voting for Prop 50, which is a redistricting proposal, was a suitably non-regime act.

And no - I didn't ride there on the electric scooter - the green and white abandoned vehicle corpses are ubiquitous.

 

mist and sun

It was magically misty when we went out for a walk this morning - and thank goodness it's damp and misty outside tonight, because there are fireworks going off all over LA this evening - LET'S GO DODGERS.  Unbelievable game: possibly my heart rate will crawl down eventually.  But to put it another way: there were a lot of reasons to be very happy living in this city, today.