the ruins in the neighborhood

If only all the neo-classicism that is being spuriously erected in DC could suffer the same fate ... but this is just one more house being stripped, flipped, updated.  This neighborhood is under a state of permanent reconstruction: you wouldn't think that there was inflation, or a high mortgage rate.  Part of this phenomenon is that when we bought here, thirteen - nearly fourteen - years ago, there were a lot of old family houses, and as people our age and a little older downsize or move on, so there's what a realtor would call plenty of scope for these properties to be Reimagined.  The result is a constant parade of workers and dumpsters and portapotties and cement mixers and pool installers and all the rest of it.  I doubt that these crumbling pillars are destined for recycling ...

 

fall geranium

The garden is starting to look a bit grey and faded and fin de saison, and various plants have died that one wishes hadn't died, and so some areas just look ... bare.  It's been far too hot an end to the summer, and the temperature is due to hit unpleasant heights this weekend again (is this better than all the rain in Santa Fe?  Alice is heading there tomorrow, and will report back.). But here, at least, there are a couple of geraniums on their second, or fifth, or tenth go-around blooming, and I celebrate them...

 

... and back to the library

This is not a heading designed to open up some glib reference to the Book of Nature, but - as plenty of you will recognize from this image - a celebration of getting back into the Huntington.  Over the past far-too-many years, it's been far too rare a thing to get there: Covid, of course, but before and after that, the endless demands of chairing and being DGS, and despite my avowed intent to clear a weekly library and research day, that happened more in theory than in practice.  But now that I'm on leave, I can head over very easily to my very favorite library ... or rather, what would be my favorite library if it wasn't currently undergoing so much reconstruction and earthquake retrofitting and the like that the benefits of being able to access what I need on open shelves aren't, alas, available.  However, the sheer pleasure of working in uninterrupted quiet was there; as was the pleasure of coming outside at the end of the working day and seeing flowering trees and mountains; as was this further pleasurable treat of a bamboo-filled courtyard on the way to the reading room ...there used to be a second such court, where one could sit and eat one's lunch, but unfortunately this encouraged Rodents, and alas the bamboo in that particular space is no more.

 

back!

That's not just me, back from two far-too-short days in Iowa City, but the rugs, which are home from their summer vacation - i.e. being deep cleaned, and stored, and quarantined, after the Unfortunate Episode of Fleas in May.  We still have no idea where they came from, and it wasn't as though the whole house was hopping, but still - fleas.  And poor Alice had to cope with the invasion while after a few days I disappeared to Argentina and could be of little practical assistance.  Bur - all fingers and paws crossed - let's hope that this springtime eruption was a one-off.  As for Gramsci - he is absolutely delighted to be able to stretch out on his favorite, and flattering, surfaces again.

 

dioramas

A real treat this afternoon.  Our sessions were in a room in the Natural History Museum, which includes this 1914 cyclorama of Laysan Island - one of the north Hawai'ian islands - which resulted from a university expedition there in 1911 - one of the first cycloramic bird displays in the US.  And there were cases and cases of mammals and other birds in their habitats, mostly from the very late 1920s and the 1930s, so far as I can tell from the Museum's website.

Note the very fine dandelion in with the buffalo.

I also particularly liked agricultural Iowa in 1880.

Indeed, all United States habitats were here ...

 

on the farm

Aren't these amazing huge cabbages?!  After a very academic morning, of the kind that reminded me why I love this profession (ideas! people!), off we went to Johnson County Poor Farm, just outside Iowa City.  This - reaching back to 1855 - was an asylum for the unhoused, and for those with mental disabilities, until 1988, growing their own food - up to 70 people were residents here at one time.

But now, the farm is a community-led space (space? 160 acres!), growing all kinds of things; encouraging people to become vegetable farmers; growing food for food banks and schools and farmers markets, and most wonderfully of all, perhaps, giving opportunities to local immigrants to grow their familiar foodstuffs, and practice familiar methods of cultivation - I wish we've overlapped with one of their markets.

Here we have okra - I had no idea it had such beautiful flowers -

and birdfeeder gourds.

And we were set to work!  I was part of the tomato patch crew, taking down twine and pulling up stakes and getting the patch ready for autumn;

I could have opted to prepare garlic that had been dried, ready for planting.

We finished up in the cow shed - a pioneering cowshed in its time - admiring the fibreglass cow.  This reminded me very strongly of - maybe 2003? - when I went on a four and a half day Rutgers tour of New Jersey for new faculty, which included (among many other wonders) a dairy farm, with very live cows... 

Also, so far as my career as an agricultural laborer goes, I have a blister from cutting tomato twine.

 

wallpaper

Quite an eyeful, here in the Graduate Hotel in Iowa City - my bathroom, and the hallway - from which one can tell that yes, I'm in the agricultural mid-west.   It's Vcologies time - my favorite workshop/mini-conference.  

There must have been some reason why I thought that Des Moines was the best airport for Iowa City.  It certainly wasn't the directions given by our host ... On the other hand, I did come on a direct flight from LAX, and I couldn't have forecast that I'd be greeted by an apocalyptic deluge that made driving a rental car down I-80 for a couple of hours less than a load of fun.  The wallpaper cheered me up!

 

hydration

whatever was wrong with me the other week (the last attempt to solve the puzzle, which is the peculiarly itch-making heart monitor that I've worn for the last seven days, will be mailed off tomorrow), I remain convinced that dehydration had something to do with it.  So, showing that I've internalized that lesson, this is me sitting at the bar in the University Club in the late afternoon as I wait to see whether the person I'm meeting will lead me astray from my puritanical choice ...

 

color for dinner

Dinner was ... bright (tomatoes, avo, onion, cottage cheese, herbs from the garden, grapes, and my latest serious addiction, chili crunch).  There may be few meals that are not improved by chili crunch.

 

Wil E., hunting

No, this isn't in a zoo - it's just through the fence at the Silver Lake reservoir.  There have been a lot of coyotes around recently - bold, fit ones.  There was one in our yard yesterday, just under my study window - probably saw the Dodgers game was on TV and dropped round to check out the score, watched with complete fascination by Moth and Gramsci.  There was one heading up someone's front path on Griffith Park Boulevard this morning.  And then this guy, who - completely unconcerned about passing humans, dogs, etc. - was doing a repeated pounce and dig on ... Gophers? Moles?  (do we have moles?) Rats?  something underground that burrows, anyway, and he looked very indignant that he didn't come up with a tasty breakfast.  I very much approve of this type of rodent control: he was decidedly at home.

 

rug rearrangement

One of Gramsci's many hobbies is burrowing under rugs.  Often he does this in search of his own tail: he can hunt that pretty grey and black appendage endlessly, surprise it, pounce on it - and then whisk it away and put it back into play.  It's a game of fort/da, without having to let go of the object at any point.

But he was up to something else this morning.  Here, he looks more in motion than he actually was: he rested his head against the rug he'd turned over for some time, in a way that made me suspect that this comfort-loving cat was constructing his own furniture for lounging on.

 

Other people’s house painting

After weeks of walking around Eldorado - weeks and weeks - looking at different shades of stucco (all of them, basically, south-western soil colors), and contemplating different trims - is that grey too blue? too green? too light? too dark? - it's quite a shock to walk around and see the unregulated, wild colors of ... Silver Lake.  Five years ago there was a very definite Silver Lake aesthetic of very dark grey house and white trim, with black house numbers: now ... is this the way ahead?  Overlooking the reservoir, it's a little startling ...

 

ready for El Niño?

It looks a bit like a musical instrument; a bit of plumbing; an elephant's trunk ... It's actually a curve of copper piping going from the downspout all the way along the back side of the house, and then, hopefully, depositing precipitation somewhere down the slope.  We've had our gutters mended, edged, extended - whatever it takes, in the hope that they'll be able to cope with whatever the forthcoming Super El Niño will throw at us. Of course, I fully expect them to be overwhelmed if there's a true inundation, but we'll see.  They all look very fine and shiny (which means, of course, that I feel very vulnerable to copper thieves, but the gutter guy reassures us that they'll soon tarnish and be less attractive to human magpies looking to carry off glittering loot).

 

ants

This notice tells its own dismal story.  It wasn't a day in which I needed to walk into the bathroom first thing, and encounter battalions of tiny black ants.  They were coming in at the top of the window, marching down one side, and one platoon then struck out across the floor, and another into the washbasin ...

Luckily, we had some diatomaceous earth left over from earlier invasions, and I've been generous with its distribution.  But still - that bathroom is off bounds while the white powder does, I hope, do its job.  However, I'm itchy all over with imaginary ants, and that's on top of a very itchy reaction to the adhesive on the heart monitor I have to wear for a week, which feels like having a whole lot of mosquito bites under it.  This seems (for what else is google for, if not wondering about shared experiences) very depressingly common ...

 

LA wall

It's LA abstract wall week ... or: I seem to have spent a very great deal of today in the car.  I might easily resent how much driving one has to do in Los Angeles (I certainly resent how much I have to pay for gas at the moment, but that's another matter), were it not for the fact that there is always so much to look at.

 

architectural eclecticism

I feel that I should be able to extract some kind of contemporary allegory from this: a Russian orthodox church; a very shuttered and boarded off gas station, but it defeats me.  Even if the reason for my driving across town today was to visit the dentist, it was still good to have a sustained exposure to Los Angeles's architectural diversity - something I've just discovered, too, enhances the first couple of pages of The Day of the Locust, a novella that I really should have read before now, but haven't ...

 

caesalpinia pulcherrima

Down the street and round the corner, this tree is always spectacular in September.  There are plenty of trees and plants - well, at least three that grow around here - known as "Bird of Paradise." This is one of them, also known as Pride of Barbados, as well as Red Bird of Paradise - but to distinguish it from other ones, let's give it its full Latin name: extremely beautiful, indeed.  You wouldn't think that it belonged to the pea family, would you?

 

cracking street art

A claw extending on this large street mural in Venice CA, cracking and peeling in the sun.  That was how we felt when we went off to have lunch with a friend at Gjelina's - normally a great place for lunch, but it was so hot, so humid, that we ordered take-out and retreated.  Of course, how can one not wonder if this is the new and awful normal?  It is surely never this humid and hot by the ocean - not in mid-September.

 

a much quieter day!

Who knew that we'd get a second round of roses in September: these are The Poet's Wife, looking good.

I was so grateful, after yesterday, for a quiet day... and I feel fine, if somewhat tired.  Which isn't to say that I'm ignoring that weird event and what it told me my blood pressure can do (I'm very inclined to blame the heat and humidity for sending things haywire): it was soberingly unpleasant.  But my gratitude for being able to sit around quietly is nothing to my gratitude to you kind people who reached out, and who recognized what a scary day it was.

 

not the day I was planning

All seems to be well, thank goodness - but I spent most of today in Glendale Memorial Hospital (and may I recommend their emergency room and teams of people, should you need them ...).  We were heading off for a walk this morning in Griffith Park, parking at the zoo - and I suddenly felt very dizzy and weird, and thought it best that Alice drove me straight to the ER ... and I was tested for everything under the sun: CAT scan (no stroke); a long, noisy MRI (nothing remarkable); ECG (heart fine); blood work - presumably fine, since no one ever told me it wasn't ... the only unusual thing was very high blood pressure when I was admitted.  So I'll need to sort that out: everything else was a huge relief.  Also a huge relief was being released ... Top marks to Alice for her thoughtfulness, even while also trying to deal with the gutter menders.  I'm exhausted ...

 

seasonal

This view of Silver Lake reservoir has the air of a slightly faded, vignetted picture postcard of the Lake District from the sixties.  The vignetting is, in fact, the product of taking the photo through the mesh of the wire fence surrounding the reservoir - and then I decided that the effect was so dated that I deliberately wouldn't crop it, and indeed would tweak the color just a little for full period impact.  What remained the same was the bough of faintly autumnal leaves ...

... though nothing says Changing Seasons quite so loudly as going into Gelsons and seeing this family already hanging out there.  It's only September 10th ...

 

they made it!

 

... as did we, but - arriving when the temperature was still 104 - we were all a little wilted.  But here you'll see four little troughs of herbs, and geraniums, and probably a few stray tiny morning glory plants.  We didn't exactly smuggle them back from Santa Fe (where they would almost certainly have perished from drought or - the geraniums, in a month or so - from frost), because technically it's legal to bring plants into California from Santa Fe county.  But not all plant inspectors at the border know that, so they crossed the state line and through the inspection station sweating away under some judiciously positioned raincoats.  Of course, we weren't stopped - I don't think we have been under this regime, since the personnel are doubtless off somewhere doing less savory things.

the good, the ugly, and the bad - driving back to LA, first leg

the good would be the remaining bits of beauty in the back yard ... and the early morning sun.  Rest assured I have four troughs of plants in the back of the car, which smells like a greenhouse (I've made sure the catmint is in a direct and soothing line from the kitty noses).

The ugly comes in the form of a truly vile t-shirt spotted at a gas station just outside of Albuquerque - a t-shirt that glosses over how this regime treats vets, one might add -

And the bad?  Of course that would be Gramsci - put him into a good hotel bedroom, and he's trying to tear the rugs off the walls ...

 

geometry

Is there anything more perfect than a sleeping Moth in her basket?  And whilst you're at it, you might want to count not just circles, but triangles, starting with her pretty ears, and then looking at holes in the wooden bench, the carpet, the angles of light.  She's getting as much sleep as possible: they both of them know (bags everywhere) that they'll be on the road tomorrow, and they will expect to be nice and active and bouncing off the furniture all through the llight at La Posada, I'm sure ...

 

winding down

... that would both be the plants outside, and us, working hard at our packing and cleaning and generally trying to assure Gramsci (Moth is much more laid back) that we won't be leaving him here.  I remember a colleague back at Rutgers - Myra Jehlen - hearing my lamentations one day about decamping from New Jersey to New Mexico at the end of one semester or another, and from the vantage point of someone with a house in Vermont, she advised me just to keep one of everything in each place.  I can see the value of that when it comes to ... vacuum cleaners, say; but books?  And I'm not going to have duplicate copies of my favorite clothes.  And what about Moth's specialist cat food?  And so on ...

 

pies

I'm not a big pie eater - or, if that sounds improbably puritanical, I'm not a big pastry easter: I will happily munch my way through the interior of any number of pies, sweet or savory.  But the array as we left Harry's this evening was extraordinarily impressive (the pie cupboard was being tidied out for the evening before these all go back to have a good night's sleep), and even I, despite being full of tinga de pollo tacos, was very tempted .. (no, I didn't succumb.  But it could have been a close call).

 

not the most picturesque of views

... but for the bevy of stucco-menders and layers; the carpenter; the painters; the handymen who have been passing through this place and who will continue to do so for the next few weeks, one imagines that it's a very welcome sight.

The people who may be less happy, however - or the person - would be the realtor selling the house on the left - now 52 days on the market, and its owners long ago having departed for Brooklyn.  Somehow the deliverers of this useful tiny edifice have deposited it in the sightline of just about the one window that doesn't look out into an overgrown tree ...

 

more rearrangement ...

The stuccoing, the mending, and the rest of it continues ... We've had to pull all the plant pots away from the house and the walls and into the middle of the yard - where they look quite good massed together, especially with the solar powered lights stuck in them (relocated from the edge of the terrace, so workers don't trample on them) ...

 

Zozobra week!

 

It's Zozobra week!  Old Man Gloom will go up in flames on Friday night in Fort Marcy Park (luckily a bear has descended from a tree there and ambled off), full of things that people want to get rid of written on little pieces of paper - bad things that they've said or done or thought (a bit like a confessional), or, let's say, the name of the president.  We won't, I think, be there (although I've always rather wanted to go) - but I'm happy to celebrate him in virtual form, here in a mural on the back of a closed dry cleaners on Cerrillos.  

September sky

Hard to believe that we've arrived at September, but when I went for a (literally) fast walk this evening, I could more or less tell myself that there was a faint sense of fall in the air.  Another way of putting it: it's time the Dodgers got their act together ...