Workpoints

So take a look at me now...

This post from last year. Quite an anticipation of the subsequent nolens volens cavalcade. Even Silver Strand is in there, via elaborate subtext.

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Yesterday evening on the west side. LA Louver filled with the usual: unapproachable art, and people more than willing to enjoy themselves anyway. Demonstrating the Wilde theorem once again. Ooo, look at that other one.

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Today: no sleep for 36 hours now. How can you stay up all damn night and not have an Overnighter to show for it?

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Dinner tomorrow down in Hermosa, and back to Hermosa my Portugal later next week for a few blessed days.

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Bev is peace. Perfect peace. Izzy is the diabolical one, though, although Bev insists Izzy loves me.

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Burning Torch---a phalanx of women dropping in behind the lines, for the sale: Bev, Machiko, Lisa, Madamina. Et al. All have their times and strategies in pocket. Madamina: good for every business she touches.

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Also tomorrow: one of THOSE birthdays for Terry Brogan. "Yet the vinyard's ruby treasure / brighten autumn's sob'rer time."

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Memlik and Justine in Geneva.

Page 138 (Clea)

But we know that the history of literature is the history of laughter and pain. The imperatives from which there is no escape are: Laugh till it hurts, and hurt till you laugh!

--L. Durrell, Clea

Page 42

In a night so brillant with stars where the glow-worms in the shrill dry grass gave back their ghostly mauve lambence to the sky there was nothing else to do but sit by her side, stroking that dark head of beautiful hair and saying nothing.

--L. Durrell, Justine

Alexandria Hothouse

A selfish day. I sent out a couplethree emails, looking for old data points on: me. One came back not making me out to be the scoundrel I thought I was. I was almost disappointed, but ultimately relieved.

I wrote a little today, not much. I took out from the basement the old A Summer Away interlinear, looking through part two, the part I deleted from the book, for inspiration. I liked most of it. It's now upstairs. I don't think I have it as an electronic file anywhere though.

I remember when I first tried to edit it liking it up to page eight, then page fifteen, then page twenty, then page twenty-five...and in the process of editing it thinking it was hopeless, every five-page advance changes things everywhere, like a new drop in a loom. When I looked at part one, it worked just fine without it. I was reminded of a debt to Durrell. I also read more of Justine today.

Even my first novel had a debt to Durrell. Significantly, to me anyway, it's been lost for years; a woman named Millicent, who last I heard splits her year between Spain and Morocco, may have the only copy.

I have been looking through my papers tonight. Some have been converted to kitchen uses, some the child has destroyed. This form of censorship pleases me for it has the indifference of the natural world to the constructions of art---an indifference I am beginning to share. After all what is the good of a fine metaphor for Melissa when she lies buried deep as any mummy in the shallow tepid sand of the black estuary?

--L. Durrell, Justine, p. 15

"Kitchen uses" recalls something else: Haydn's wife used music to line pastry pans. Did you know that? In 1980, the guy who wrote that line (it's from a poem) also told me this much about the Alexandria Quartet: "The six months you're reading it, it's the best thing you've read. Then you finish and ask yourself what you liked." I didn't agree then; I don't agree now. Pritchett and Steiner have both written of it glowingly, too.

Every now and then, you run into a fellow traveller. I once brought an old paperback copy of Justine into the office with me (I still have it; it's nearly disintegrated, but I have preserved it in a plastic bag) and when my boss Barbara Goldstein saw it, she gasped; it had been so long since she had thought of it, and she reassembled her affection for it.

The book has unquestionably stamped my life. Yet I am never fan enough to join any kind of admiration or scholarship society. I'll just keep reading; it's great summer reading, and at this lifestage, it's more relevant than re-reading Proust.

page 17

So that the taste of this writing should have taken something from its living subjects---their breath, skin, voices---weaving them into the supple tissues of human memory. I want them to live again to the point where pain becomes art. . . .Perhaps this is a useless attempt, I cannot say. But I must try.

--L. Durrell, Justine

11:06 a.m.

Yesterday I wrote one of those letters in the backyard. I thought when I began it that it would not be one of those letters, but as I read it and re-read it, it indeed was. I read it and tore it up before I even left my chair. Then I crumpled up many of the individual shreds and tossed them into various ferns, blackberry vines, etc.

The ironic thing was, immediately after I tore the paper up, I heard the low-shrill, distinctive twerp, almost like a cellphone, of the woodpecker again. I looked up and saw that the sound was coming from the scrub oak next door. I couldn't locate the woodpecker, but I heard the tapping.

11:06 a.m. for me is four days dry; also, four days since the woodpecker geomancy. Right to start summer dry, the woodpecker said. Right to tear up that letter, the woodpecker came back to say again. The mystery afforded by birds work for me better than deconstructed Catholicism or the I Ching these days.

This morning: small white butterflies, six of them, clustering in the very places where I threw the tearings of the letter, doing their dance over its fragments. They fly apart, then swirl around each other, mostly in pairs but sometimes in threes, and then they fly apart, and fly together again for another go. Sometimes they perch on the drooping nasturtium leaves. They're not so different from us.

UPDATE suggested by a friend: fyi, 11:06 a.m. was the time that summer arrived this year.

Sunday Afternoon: Compass Points

---SSE: I walked from here to Union Station today, about six miles. Picked up a fabled (to trainiacs, anyway) National Timetable, left a message for Brogan, and took the Metro back. Am contemplating a train getaway in August, adjacent to our trip to Oregon.

--A bit W: We know Vivian especially to favor family and children, but last night we saw only her adult side, and it was an enchanting side to see. She also brought me six Modelos, not aware I had gone on one of my periodic temperance binges.

--Very E: Lynn's parents are at it again, this time sending us an article on the war they clipped from the Wall Street Journal. Author: Senator Joe Lieberman. Conclusion: the consequences are too grave to permit failure in Iraq. To me: that's like saying the consequences of a low score on your SAT are too grave to permit, which makes it such a shame that you never studied nor took anyone's advice before you walked in the room and started to take it.

--Very very E: from St. Louis, an old acquaintance finds the blog and agrees with my opinions on "status anxiety." (The term was popularized by Alain de Botton, who has written one of those breezy western-civ-at-closing-time books he does so well for a young guy.) The somewhat long lost contact writes: "Contentment seems almost a dirty word these days -- a codeword for having given up or not being up to snuff...My wife, my (new) daughter, time to spend socially, time to devote at the gym, time to finally make a dent in my reading, and time to do a little bit of teaching (and do it right) -- the wonder is how I didn't figure it out earlier."

--Right here: I've got a couple of print pieces in the hopper, but after that I will likely take a break from scribbling such, to focus on fiction. My experience: novels fly best in summer.

The Overnighter

Marie Millington-Drake, from Lawrence Durrell, A Biography, Ian MacNiven, 1998


There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.
---L. Durrell, Justine


It's not an either/or, it's a sequence, a process. Someone makes their appearance; we tell the tales of that appearance; it's our own personal history, Scheherezad living another day, and eventually it's lit crit. No need for literature yet because love is what literature seeks to know. The easiest part, the love part, is first: the oral history project, the storytelling part.

It gets more textual after the storytelling ends, because suffering is such a complicated choice; is there value, is there familiarity, is there shock, are there intimations of mortality? If so, suffering is the sweeter path than the path of putting one banal foot in front of the banal other and moving on.

Finally, the transformation into literature; a stage only for those predisposed to process the women that run through their life to the fullest extent. Transformation is a kind of interanimation, because the book always co-mingles with another book; that is storytelling, the layering and layering and layering of story upon story upon story until they all flatten into one. In lit, the love and the suffering both can live; worse, the writer can process love through suffering like no other vocation, because of the extra set of keys he has to the funhouse doors that nobody else knows about.

One note: We were talking of Stephanie this evening---Stephanie, which is not only a good name for Stephanie, it would be a good name for either Lynn or Lisa.

Another note: two days dry, merely two, and everyone thinks you've grown a layer of concrete all around you.

~~~

Durrell, brooding, once thought he could have married Marie Millington-Drake and thereby made his life happier and easier. And wondered---maybe briefly, maybe eternally, it's not clear---why he didn't. Who wouldn't brood about not marrying the Botticelli angel in their life?

Marie Millington-Drake, not a writer, died in Sicily at age 41, lonely, drunk.

The Overnighter

Edward Hopper, Summer Interior, 1909

Then it became a dark summer inside. Inside, initially, I froze. I froze for a day, two. You cannot wait forever at this lifestage.

Then I drew on the forgiving and energizing light of summer. It first came as the woodpecker, the Nuttall's, that visited me scant seconds after the summer commenced. For five full minutes I watched him hammering the walnut tree, taking all kinds of obtuse angles to attack it. I became more alive than I had been in years. I stopped drinking. I went to a hopeless wedding---a hopeless wedding: for me, another promising sign---and later took the driver's side seat on a mad dash from the Westside to Sunland Tujunga in a mad Camaro at 1 a.m. for five dollars worth of albuterol. There were full and empty, empty and very empty cans of Diet Dr. Pepper and hundreds of other things in the car, as there always were with this driver, even decades ago. Though I hate messy car interiors, even this I took as a promising sign of continuity. Then I came home and slept acceptably well.

I woke up and had a marvellously vacuous morning. In the early afternoon, I took a walk around the reservoir. In the late afternoon, Viv and I got Gina's car out of our garage after a year and a half; we coasted it down the hill and pushed it into Jul's. I thought I might only have to wait until Saturday, rather than endure forever.

Elsewheres

Friend of mainbrace John Shannon is profiled today in the LATimes. The article, which includes good biographical notes, suggests that Shannon is among those deserving wider recognition.

Friend of mainbrace Doug Bandow has a meaningful piece in the American Spectator on the shame of the international community in dealing with North Korea. It draws heavily from a December 2006 report on torture in North Korea by a South Korean-based human rights group.

Friend of mainbrace Rodger Jacobs fairly nixes probate as a solution to his Bay Area housing dilemmae.

Tequila Sunrise

There's a moth on the wall, ignoring him. The
mockingbirds are besides themselves with
the first act of dawn; they have wind enough
to sing trios, carelessly con brio.

A solstice morning in a stationery
life: everything arrested at last, after the tossing,
after the empty sleeplessness. Another
tiresome limited equity production, closed. He

takes the shotglass up from the manila
folder and it leaves a small ring behind, like the face of
an old Timex. In pencil, notes from a conversation
that went nowhere. Badly but barely---

maybe this will feel better. Maybe not.
The moth on the wall is somewhere else.

Blackberries

The bees were working the nasturtiums last week; now they've moved up; now they're working the blackberries. Thanks to the January freeze, we won't get a single apricot this year, after last year's bounty; no limes either. But the common blackberries---

And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven

---those will fill many crepes in late July I hope.

I'll be checking the time tomorrow. At precisely 11:06 a.m. Thursday, 6/21, if all goes to plan---right as summer arrives---I'll start trimming some of the too-tangly and too wilted nasturtiums back.

Summer is when weeding begins, if not gardening itself; anyone can plant things that look nice in the spring, but summer requires management, stabilizing, propping, coaxing.

The nasturtiums lasted all spring; it was a long spring for them, and there will likely still be a few orange flowers around the Fourth of July. But when the garden starts to lose the lavender of the society garlic and the orange nasturtiums, and with the irises long gone, the shift to summer is often a drastic spinning of the color wheel.

Today at around sunset I watched a crow flap up and up and up---the top rays of the sun, rays that were shooting far over my head---found his feathers, and lit him up in gold---then he dove, back in the shadow of the earth again.

No, really, I don't like people taking my picture

flickr.com/45/114292052_efed330d77.jpg

Comfort food

Not sure I warm to the Hallmark Sundays: Mothers Day, Fathers Day. I would rather be thinking other things. Halloween is not objectionable but I dislike the commercialism and am sorry that it is being returned to Europe via the American marketing corps. As far as mass goes, I never like to be standing there, not a father, not having one anymore either, and hearing a sermon more directed to fathers than other kinds of ideas.

So today, obliged to do the putative thing, I plunked myself in front of a long-standing father's television---the television of Lynn's father as it happens---and watched as many strokes of the US Open as I could; damn many, as it turned out. I took my own mulligan on the day, doing little other than watching, and chain drinking Modelos. Inevitable hamburgers on the grill.

It was, you would have to say, pleasant, even out there in the suburban infield. There were few intrusions, except for when I put together the guacamole, which was no intrusion at all. There was some general hilarity amist chess games with youngsters later---chess, can things actually be coming to this? We're all supposed to rendezvous in Oregon in mid-August; maybe I should go over a few games between now and then.

I am not any kind of family man at all. I had my family life, and did some if not all of the right things, but it ended in 1991 when my parents died. Family life is something I recall, not something I live. As I have said elsewhere, I hate the famous Tolstoy quote on families at the beginning of Anna Karenina; rather, I believe all families are simply varying mixtures of happiness and unhappiness, comfort food and poison. If some families look better or worse to us than others, it is only our own envy that makes them so.

Cherokee or Las Palmas

The west end of Franklin has been fairly useless to me since the abomination of Hollywood and Highland but decades of the muscle memory of cruising east on Franklin are inside of me, making me curious as to how it will turn out; I usually bail out just in time, Cherokee or Las Palmas, and then am momentarily confounded by the deliberately confounded meridians blocking the kind of turn on Yucca that you would like to make; still, I'm ready to make any Y turn into any driveway, now free and south all the way to Melrose. At the west end of Melrose, the gallery has over two-dozen self-portraits up, and Lisa's is the only plastics arts entry in the derby; its also the one given the full window treatment; and it's the one everyone favors most. She could have walked but she didn't; Lynn took her back home, and I drove alone. I come up for a drink and then say I'm going to Whole Foods, but I'm really going to Canter's, of course, to bring back not some dry anywhere Whole Foods sandwich but a sandwhich with LA's dna written into it, a Canter's pastrami and swiss on a kaiser roll with mustard. Still, I hit Santa Monica Boulevard on the way, found a radio station that was playing the Sheryl Crow anthem to the street, got trapped in the left lane too late, made a left on Fairfax instead of a right, made another Y-turn, to head down to Canter's. From Canter's it was all sidestreets, Oakwood and north on Sweetzer, which has the beautiful quiet veer. Back at Lisa's I somehow make an elaborate point in the middle of the narrative about the real trek: "There are two quintessential LA experiences, one is movement---sliding along a surface street efficiently, to get from somewhere to somewhere else---and the other is static, sitting somewhere and feeling that this is it, the end of the earth, the edge of experience." Honestly, that was the way it came out, but I have been considering such things in all four of my novels so it wasn't really that spontaneous. Sheryl Crow said We are drinking beer at noon on tuesday / In a bar that faces a giant car wash which is of course the end of the earth, the edge of a particular stripe of experience, and Santa Monica Boulevard is the movement, the slide of a surface street through a world of flux. Every now and then somebody gets it right, even perfectly so, like Lisa with her plastic midriff piece or Sheryl Crow with her name with an S rather than a C and that last name and her introductory anthem to what makes life life in LA. I hear the swimsuit demo went well. I like a good beer buzz early in the morning Sheryl Crow also sings and people generally have accepted that about her but they also wonder about my Modelos and the 7-11 and why I might be different than them---do I have a license to be different, because I'm not Sheryl Crow and after all as Sheryl also says The good people of the world are washing their cars / On their lunch break, hosing and scrubbing / As best they can in skirts in suits and don't look at me to do any of these things either or even have a lunch break at all but to live life as a lunch break, this is the point, it's the same point that Deleuze and Guattari make in Anti-Oedipus about nomads and it is the same attack of stupid Charles and especially hollow-to-the-core Emma Bovary that Flaubert made, yet always, everywhere, everywhere, people torture themselves over being the good people of the world, torturing themselves over washing their cars and over accomplishment. Yesterday Lynn was looking for books to get rid of, and she spotted Status Anxiety and asked if she could get rid of that and I said no. Nomads live in the City with the muscle memory of sliding down Franklin---it should be clear, not congested, at Highland, but even if it's not you make a Y turn off of Franklin and slide right past---and nomads also park not in Canter's lot but on Hayworth the way they did shortly after they got their license---ah, there's that word again---and take in the night air and also the Art Mortimer mural, looking for Sandy Koufax in it, an image right out of one nomad's pre-licensing childhood, sitting with his father at ages seven and eight, Club Level, when they still rented seat cushions to you and when it was mostly called Chavez Ravine, before there was the abomination of Hollywood and Highland and you had to make Y turns because of the blocked-off meridians on Yucca; and I hear the swimsuit demo went well.

Distressed

Ceramic show. It occurs to me that this is a generational thing; the bourgeoisie didn't go to ceramics shows before the 1970s. The one out in Altadena-adjacent Pasadena, way up on Lake, Xiem, has only grown over the years---it's now out in the parking lot too. We were late. By the time Lynn and I got there, they were almost out of chips. Noted the red wine: a magnum of Mondavi, Woodbridge, an empty bottle. Damn.

Some FIDM people, Anne and Sarah and a cute and clever Bay-area transplant named Donna Marie, were there well ahead of us, and left before we arrived, for dinner: we recommended Yahaira, and were stunned that they actually chose it. Anne wanted us to look at a piece by Kevin Nguyen, a ceramicist recently featured on Ceramics Monthly. She likes the piece but is concerned about the amount of pink in it.

Lynn talks to Nguyen about three pieces, including the one Anne's interested in. Nguyen says that the really finely-broken distressed piece was fired at about 2800 degrees, and the less finely-broken distressed piece at about 2200. The pieces are highly sculptural and Asian inspired, more Japanese than Siamese. We confer with Ann over the phone and pick it up for her. Nguyen signs magazine featuring his work on the cover. It says, "To Lynn," not "To Anne."

"Those three pieces, if they were all white, they would have all sold," Lynn tells me.

Down Lake to Yahaira. Kitchen closing. Outside on a night to be outside; dining on the sidewalk on a night to be dining on the sidewalk. The women are very happy with Yahaira. Sarah's pleased to learn of a new restaurant. Anne into a Negro Modelo. Donna Marie not into LA all that much, but having a good time anyway with her sangria. I'm having a New York Steak a la Mexicano, prompted by the latest Saveur issue into thinking of beef all week.

Some of the table chat is about campus security issues, which distresses me, not because I'm fearful for anyone, but because the media have generally given all local campus security stories a free ride. What with the student tasering in November, the hacking of the 800,000 names in December, and threats to researchers, and now the separatist-graduation discussion, UCLA has had a visibly bad track record, and one the acting Chancellor only seems eager to promote. Other schools go about their business far more quietly.

I say if UCLA cancels graduation, that's fine with me, because most of the students don't deserve to graduate anyway. It elicits some snickers at the table.

After dinner, a breezy walk to various cars, and the transfer of the distressed Nguyen piece.

The year fins peaked

A Broganesque palm, reflected...

Those of us of, um, a certain age, just have to love this story:

Oklahoma unearths 1957 Plymouth Belvedere.

Here's the official website, if you're more curious.

Or maybe it just appeals to me, because that's the precise car my parents had when I was born.

FWIW, 1957 was the year that fins peaked to their full extent on Chevrolets and Plymouths. A good photo of one is here.

Looking at that car in my infancy, I guess I grew up unwilling to compromise: the cars I've coveted all my life have been the utterly finless '67 Vette Stingray and the fin-resplendent '57 Chevy Nomad. Short of those, it's been...public transportation.

Weed whacking

Both Zen and western philosophy say a lot about perception.

Today in the backyard I noted that a few iris leaves were turning brown; increasingly they go that way all the way until November; then they will get cut down, but the root will live. When they come back...it could be December, it could be late March; it is when the root is ready.

If you think that you
Have cut off illusory mind,
Instead of simply clarifying
How illusory mind melts,
Illusory mind will come up again,
As though you had cut off
The stem of a blade of grass
And left the root alive.

--Menzan Zuiho (1682-1769)

Similarly, Kant noted in Critique of Pure Reason that we don't perceive the totality of any object, only the surface of some. In fact, we live nonstop on surfaces.

I have been much taken this spring by Sartre's statement in The Transcendence of the Ego that consciousness is an emptiness, a wind blowing towards objects. It fits so nicely with both Zen and Kant. The ego is external to the self---it's a construct. What is external to the self must be empty...

For an iris, or when Achileo cuts the grass with his weed whacker, like he did today, the leaf itself is not the reality, it's just the surface of the plant, the full plant that we categorize but don't fully perceive. It gets cut, grows back---the cycle itself is another object towards which we might blow. You like gardens, computers, ice cream? Objects you are blowing towards, given your unique conditioning.

Judgment of Paris

For years, our State's prison industrial complex has warehoused too many people too long for too many petty crimes. Now more people can see why this is so.

Instead of groups clamoring for the release of more prisoners for parole violations, petty theft, and incidental drug possession, we only see advocacy groups insisting that unequal justice be applied to all. This is counterintuitive; they should be clamoring for more releases.

This is the consequence of turning the prison system into a mere cog in the State's economy. The average prison guard is a member of one of the few remaining powerful unions in the State, and on average makes almost $80,000 a year--$100,000+ salaries are not uncommon. These guards watch over 170,000 inmates at 32 prisons (Japan, a country with four times as many people as California, has 80,000 inmates).

In 1980, California's prison population was 23,264. Drug possession is mostly responsible for the enormous jump in the incarceration rate.

The Overnighter

Night brings eighty-four
thousand poems of Buddha.
- Su Shih (1031-1101)

For what moment today am I most grateful?
For what moment today am I least grateful?
- The Examen (Ignatian meditation)

Walk and touch peace every moment.
Walk and touch happiness every moment.
Each step brings a fresh breeze.
Each step makes a flower bloom.
Kiss the Earth with your feet.
Bring the Earth your love and happiness.
The Earth will be safe
when we feel safe in ourselves.

- Thich Nhat Hahn

About three months ago, during Lent, I went to Forest Lawn, to do a labyrinth. I saw a woman doing the labyrinth, so I drove around the cemetary. Then I saw her walking to her car as I came back.

"Hello," I said.

"Hello," she said back.

"I do the labyrinth too," I said. "Can I ask you how it went for you?"

"Oh, I usually come here and just ask for peace."

On her practice of doing a labyrinth, she told me she usually let her mind drift emptily when she was in the center. That was a welcome kind of practice to me, as my mind is usually trading off possibilities.

She was in her 70s, and a nun. When everyone has guns drawn, weapons out, fists clenched, there's especially nothing sensible to do but contemplate peace.

Il Postino

For a while, I was missing the postcard. I only knew it was of columns and capitals; there was a lot of blue; it was recognizably Roma. Beyond that much, I wasn't sure. I had only seen it once, when I opened the package; I set it down somewhere; it disappeared.

Yesterday, while looking for my watch, I found it in madamina's drawer here at the desk. Madamina simply presumed it was hers. She has collected so many visuals from which to draw artistic inspiration, for so long, it might have come her way years ago.

I am the kind of guy who still sends paper birthday cards, paper party and even dinner invites, and paper postcards. The postcard to me remains one of life's most elegant and telling forms of communication. It tells everything: strata of taste, kind of handwriting, composition ability, location, date, mood, degree of ruin...

I used to carry postcards with me when travelling. I would put my own address and postage on them and ask a new friend to send me the postcard in a week or so. This gave the friend the opportunity to copy the address if she wanted; I liked walking around cities with postcards in my pocket, all set for strangers.

In the corner, Romulus and Remus. The perfect myth to explain Rome: two young boys, suckled not by a woman, but by a wolf.

A priest who lives in Rome once told me: "After five years in Rome you become a monument; after ten you become a relic; and after twenty you become a ruin."

Nobody was concerned that it went missing. "It will present itself when the time is right for it," she wrote. Of course it will. It is Roman---it is holy and pagan, spirit and magic.

Click on it to get the full artistry.

The Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Saturday after the Belmont at Taix, we went to the Westside where Lynn got yet another haircut; an ordinary haircut, one in a series. Meanwhile, I drove to a sidestreet in Brentwood and put another ordinary quart of oil in the ancient and ordinary Mercedes. I aslo drove out to Adelaide, where I have watched at least a couple dozen sunsets in my life; these are not ordinary, except for the people on Adelaide.

[Do you realize that, while the south side of Adelaide is City of Santa Monica, the north side of Adelaide is City of LA? You can tell by the trashcans in the driveways that plunge down a little ways into Santa Monica Canyon on the north side of the street. Of course, there's no parking on the LA side, and complex parking signs on the SaMo side.]

At the Brentwood Country Mart, there is one of those horse rides for children (do we have a good name for these?) that has an actual leather saddle strapped onto it.

After Lynn's haircut, we drove down to Abbott Kinney: Lynn wanted to check two stores across the street from each other, one that sells tennis shoes, and the other, Tortoise, has Japanese housewares. We ended up taking home four tenugui from the Japanese shop that Lynn will divide in half and use as summer napkins. Japanese design: one form, many functions.

Onwards it was to the Marina, where Salon Oblique had an opening; one in a series. There must have been sixty people there. A scene stealer was a microwave oven: it's "brand" was identified as "Global Warming" and its nine settings were labeled as various strata of environmental catastrophes. Fumiko Amano's work was also especially well received. There's always Campari at Salon Oblique, and I think I must have had my share.

Late in the evening, we went to Lisa's, whose work is always especially well received by us, and had a couple bottles of wine. Lisa' has a self-portrait in the upcoming weekend self-portrait show next week at RiskPress Gallery.

Yesterday I could barely stand the excitement of la dimance de la vie. After a late Mass, I went to two putting greens, the one at Roosevelt and one at the Los Feliz par 3. I don't feel like playing a round on weekends. Then we went to Casita del Campo for dinner and noted that all the entrees are now $15. We both ordered a la carte items; as the baby boom ages, shouldn't we be eating less?

~~~

So it was one ordinary weekend in ordinary time. One in a series. (If you're wondering why Catholics have time called "Ordinary Time"---it simply means, the Sundays that are numbered, with ordinal numbers, as in: The Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time).

The sharpest prong of the weekend was was wherein I discovered, at table at Lisa's late Saturday night, how far I have retreated from the kind of discussions you often hear in LA about "progress" in one's life, discussions about whether or not I/you/we/they should be more "accomplished." Lynn reminded me that I had told Rodger Jacobs last year that I wished people would review my books, which actually made me laugh at last year's version of me. I suppose I said that; that could indeed be what you say two years after you finish a book that nobody has reviewed. But you get over it, and rather easily.

Usually, when people are talking about accomplishment, they are talking about the extent to which they are recognized by others. I think in response I may have borrowed yet another page of Deleuze and said something about us living on many strata, not one, and consistency from year to year may be the only truly stilting and limiting thing. No, it was something like, "If you seek the acclaim of men, then verily, I say to you, you have your reward." So it was more Christ than Deleuze---but it sat in my mind as Deleuzean.

The Westside also lives on many strata. Doesn't exasperation over recognition go against the whole ginger tea / yoga / acupuncture thing?

~~~

The other thing I'm also tired of is running into so many people at cocktail parties who see such events as an opportunity to do business. I like it far more when people go to enjoy cocktails, and each other's company. More later.

~~~

By the way, it's good to see Rodger, after a considerable hiatus, is now busy reminding people that there's not much to Ian McEwan. Rodger isn't a guy who goes to cocktail parties to do business.

My local blogosphere from even eighteen months ago is almost unrecognizable: Cathy Seipp has left us forever, Mack Reed gave up LA Voice, Rodger is in San Francisco, and I am doing other things as well. Why do I have the sneaky feeling that we're all in quieter, better, more peaceful places---each one of us? Ordinary Time is a good place to be.

Triple Crown Postscript

If you and I are jogging a mile and a half, and we jog a mile and a quarter of it together in a way that doesn't really wind us much, the runner between us who is the fastest sprinter will win. If on the other hand we hustle all the way around for the full mile and a half, the runner between us who is in the best overall shape will win.

I don't think anyone should kid themselves: this is why a good sprinting filly, Rags to Riches, won the Belmont. The stunningly slow first half mile of 50.5 for sure hasn't been seen in the past ten years at the race; I can't find a slower one in the past thirty years, in fact. Affirmed suckered Alydar in the same way in 1978, in a five horse race; I think the half mile for that race was 50 flat, and Affirmed, the speedier horse, of course took the prize and the last Triple Crown. But generally the half mile fractional at the Belmont breaks around 48, and lots of speed merchants who flame out---and one who famously didn't flame out, Secretariat---even hit 46.5 or so for the first half mile.

Still, there was lots of Smart Money on R2R yesterday, including the blogosphere's Octave the Rave, and also Les Freres Taix's Fernando the Argentine---the latter's announcement did shake me up a bit on hearing it, because I had completely written the filly off---and I was first to reach over the bar and shake his hand after the race. Pletcher gets to take off that 0-fer collar for Triple Crown starts (and don't forget, Velasquez does too).

I did, er, pick the place horse, Curlin, to place, which was not worth much at all, but even so more than it should have been. That much seemed certain, despite the odds---nobody was much afraid of him after Street Sense failed to enter. But to R2R, not to Hard Spun was a bit of a surprise. To Gomez too, I think---Hard Spun looked like he had a tough first half mile and recovered nicely, but it might have taken too much out of him to put himself close to the lead by the top of the stretch, and he faded from there.

Octave the Rave doesn't fancy we California horseplayers much:

How much money there is to be made in this game on certain days of the year strictly off the bozos in California? I thought Lava Man in the BC last year was the worst underlay I had ever seen, but Tiago @ 5-1? Excuse me? Do you know how much money was bet to win on Tiago? Over a million dollars! Where do you think 80 percent of that money came from? And Lord only knows how much of the $20M total exacta/trifecta pool had him on top. On top! Giacomo, Jr.! Yes sir, you gotta love those Left Coasters.

Well, there are also Left Coasters who make most of their money off of other Left Coasters on certain other days of the year---that's the way the parimutuel system works. Nobody I know liked Tiago yesterday.

What a great year, though: Street Sense breaks the Breeder's Cup Juvenile jinx, romps twice on his beloved Churchill Downs; then looks like gold again but balks at the crowd as Curlin clips him at the Preakness, breaking absolutely everyone's heart; then R2R breaks not only the filly jinx at the Belmont but also the Pletcher jinx in the Triple Crown and gives Velazquez a great victory in a Triple Crown race too at last. And one great come from behind victory, and two great stretch battles. It didn't always go my way, but you had to love it, all the way back to last November, when Street Sense left so many others in the dust at the BC Juvenile that the English press thought he was running on harder dirt than the other ponies.

And we'll be watching for next year's best again starting at the Del Mar Futurity September 5. This year, the Del Mar Futurity has been upgraded to a Grade I stakes. See you there!

The striation of the walls

Don't just have ideas, just have an idea.---Godard
Make maps, not photos or drawings.---Deleuze and Guattari


Refrain: Sometimes in the garden, your confined space seems too much to master. You are glad it has a boundary. You couldn't handle it if it were larger, if there weren't the striation of the walls safely in place.

But also, in landscape architecture, it is increasingly more fashionable to try to violate the boundaries. A square lot looks round if there's larger foliage in the corners. Garrett Eckbo began drawing landscapes from the point of view of someone inside a modern home, violating the old boundary of wall. There is more likely to be a Buddha than a Virgin in such modern and postmodern gardens---but does that make a difference?

The essence of mind
Is formless;
This itself is the subtle
Body of reality.
The essence of mind is
Inherently empty;
This itself is the infinite
Body of space.

- Ta-chu (eighth century)

Making maps is the way of the nomad, about whom also Deleuze and Guattari say: "The nomads invented a war machine in opposition to the State apparatus. History has never comprehended nomadism, the book has never comprehended the outside." A map is needed for a war machine because for a nomad there is only new territory, there is only smooth territory rather than striated territory.

Private property follows from a human instinct---an animal instinct---towards marking territory. This is territoriality. Territoriality is, in human terms, striated space, not smooth space. In bird terms, territoriality is usually determined by who can sing better, but sometimes it's who can attack better.

Is marriage also territoriality, a claim made on another soul, a kind of slavery, complete with ownership?

Coda: sometimes in the garden, your confined space seems too much to master. You are glad it has a boundary. You couldn't handle it if it were larger, if there weren't the striation of the walls safely in place.

The sting of the sacramental

Yesterday I was reaching down into the nasturtiums by the garden tool shed to check the brick situation down there. The nasturtuims are completely covering the bricks in the southeast corner of the garden. I like to monitor the brick situation when the bricks are covered, to see if the mortarless planters are bulging them out or even have made them fall.

Something stabbed my right ring finger. I pulled it back and looked for a thorn. No thorn, but a very small red hole in the skin and almost immediate swelling.

Then I looked back down saw the culpit: a bee.

~~~

The smallest of natural interactions, yet I can remember every time in my life I've been stung by a bee, and I'll bet many others can too. Bees stand separately. They're a bigger part of the world than other insects and spiders. They're beautiful. We see them in blooming flowers. They're evidence of a happy life.

~~~

For the record, I had never been stung by a bee until 1982. My first day at UCLA, and I was walking past Kerckhoff Hall. I got a bee sting on my right hand.

Instinctively I started walking towards emergency services, not because I was worried, but because I had never been stung by a bee before, and had many other allergies. But by the time I got to the Bomb Shelter, I realized I had no allergy.

Then---statistically improbably, enough to be miraculous---I was walking by the same group of jasmine the very next day and got stung again. Right hand also. After twenty-four years without being stung by a bee, I had been stung on back-to-back days, at the same time of day, on the same hand, simply by passing the same damn bush.

I wasn't stung again until 1990. This time, it was painful.

By 1990, my limited Buddha nature had tuned me into the sufferings of insects. I was at a Mobil station on Sepulveda, and went in to get a Coke. A bee was trapped behind one of the glass doors. I saw that, and let him out.

He flew right into my face, and stung me on the lip.

So that's been it: four bee stings in fifty years. And I can remember every one as though it were sudden headline news. Lynn claims to have never been stung by a bee.

~~~

The thing that strikes me about bee stings, beyond how memorable they are, is how much a good part of life they seem to be. I remember how when I was a child, if someone "stepped on a bee" while we were playing over-the-line---many played barefoot if they had no tennis shoes at school with them---that that kind of incident ended the whole afternoon, and we huddled around the afflicted one with as much concern as ten-year-olds can muster. Then we shouldered him and took him to his pair of shoes. He was the fallen, our latest hero. You almost yearned to be him.

The whole category of incidents look like a pastoral Homer watercolor in memory. The scent of the early-blooming jasmine at Kerckhoff, all of a new university laying before me. Even the bright sunshine of the day on Sepulveda when I stopped to get a Coke feels like a gentle place. Yesterday's I'm sure will remain memorable too.

Bee stings connect.

~~~

The other day, I made the following argument to M., who always seems to have a couple of questions about Catholicism for me: either sacraments work, or they don't. Either there's a Holy Spirit present, or there isn't. Either it enters a life, or it doesn't.

The kind of sacramentary treatment of a day that we read, for instance, in Joyce's Ulysses, that to me is pure good thinking about what can be sacred in a life; and it borrows heavily from the sacramentary thinking of the man's native religion. Certainly days can be memorable without a sense of sacredness, but the sacred is wed to the literary and the mysterious, always. The thing I like best about the religion of my own cultural background is the strong exploration its best thinkers made in describing those kinds of moments that are sacred. And we see the evidence everywhere in art, in architecture, in literature.

A bee sting is such a moment in life. It can be memorable; it can be ecstatic; it can be literary, mysterious; it can be fatal; it can be pastoral and poetic. It's a sting apart.

~~~

The brick situation down there: never found out. Maybe today.

Crying all over town

This kind of stuff doesn't happen to London's town crier, only LA's town crier:

It is like we don't have a life of our own as far these people and the manager are concerned, well she is a piece of work. I am yelling at no one in particular and headed straight for the front door, she comes out of her office and starts badgering me to keep it down and then she asks what the problem is, and you know what , she tells me that it is not her problem and to take it up with section 8 housing. I get irate .I was on my way out the door when she stops me and asks me what my problem is and then tells me it is not her problem and I love how she retaliates with all of us when she finds herself making a mistake. She accuses us of trying to intimidate her.

I had a twelve-day dispute myself last month. Mine was with AT&T. My landline service was intermittent at best, and mostly crackly.

First they said someone had come out and said that the problem was my inside lines; I knew it wasn't, and I was pretty sure nobody had come out. So we went through this charade again, with the same diagnosis: another blown weekend without service.

The next Tuesday, I called them plugged directly into the outside box; they could barely hear me over the crackle on the line.

They then told me it was likely my phone, and to go check on a neighbor's phone. Although I knew it was whacked to do so, I complied. Another blown day.

Phone worked fine at Manuel's. In the irate phone call from Manuel's, while he was conveniently raking his sycamore leaves and washing his sidewalk, they said they had records of three servicemen coming out in the past two weeks, and all had said the outside line tested fine. Right: they hopped the six-foot fence and checked the box, even while I was here. I didn't think so.

All together, I probably spent a minimum of six full hours on the phone to AT&T last month. I'm not lying. Most of the calls were 45 minutes. There were at least a dozen of them. All on my cell---my cell, which they asked for the number of every time I spoke to them, but which they never called one time, not even when the servicepeople allegedly were here.

Finally they sent someone who hung a new line---the one guy at AT&T who actually works---and the thing works fine.

Then, last week, they sent out someone to fix the line again. I said the line was already fixed. They asked me if I had called "the old AT&T" or "the new AT&T."

(That reminded me of the great response of another trust officer with whom I briefly shared an office at Union Bank. A customer on the telephone had somehow reached us, not support people, and he was having a problem, and so the trust officer patched the customer into a call in which he asked another part of the bank for help with the problem. "Jeez, just tell him to call the bank!" the other manager said, not realizing the customer was on the line. "He did call the bank!" the trust officer screamed, thrilling the customer palpably, and probably thereby cementing that relationship for life.)

The strategy of civic organizations and public utilities used to be simply to provide optimal service. Now it is to turn the consumer into her own diagnostician, repair person, while harassing them as much as possible.

Who could you complain about AT&T to? They buy tons of ads in all media---even the blogosphere. For some reason, they'd rather pay ad dollars than service dollars.

Good luck to Don, who already does enough town crying.

Edge of Hollywood

M. over for dinner. Brings in his contacts kit; would like to take them out at some point. "Why don't you do that now?" I suggest, stalling for time, waiting for madamina to bring the limes home, in case M. wants a margarita. I'm not sure if you've had a margarita served as a pure cocktail, up, no rocks; but this is the way I prefer them these days, especially when the tequila is Corralejo. He takes out his contacts. Lynn---madamina---arrives. I offer margaritas straight up for everyone; no takers, M and Lynn want rocks, salt.

The centerpiece: a fired burgundy bowl in the shape of a fat quatrefoil. Floating in water: three roses, one white, two Tiffanies, big and pink, and bougainvillea all around. Me: proud of my centerpieces; too proud for most tastes, probably. Probably Faulkner did not at fifteen minutes before any guest, even one from high school, arrives, make it a habit to go out to the garden to clip the freshest cut flowers, more fresh even than the salsa, to arrange interesting centerpieces. Don't care. In touch with yin side. Sat in the garden earlier. Watered it. Leave the hose parked on the retaining wall while sitting, sipping, watching the drops playing in the sweeping afternoon light.

Chip: Norteñas, which we only know of through Cap'n Cork. Table set for buffet style: dessert forks and spoons on top of setting. No need for the wine glasses, but M. favors Modelo above wine with the Mexican cuisine dinner. Lots more movie talk. He's back from Cannes with scripts; one is Myriam, Mother of Christ. I've earlier told him about Anne Catherine Emmerich and Klemens Brentano. Interesting side-note: Brentano also adapted folk tales for Des Knaben Wunderhorn. (Reminder: was talking about Des Knaben Wunderhorn to beautiful soprano who gave glistening senor performance recital last month, I've never heard a better student recital, and she suddenly said: "Yeah, Mahler liked to sample himself.") Phone is on: M. may get call from the Russians, who are really Armenians, at any time. I learn something I like knowing: Lost in Translation shot mostly on the fly, he says: no Tokyo permits except for the hotel scenes. Re-tells story of the other M., the grand drinker. Lynn re-tells her frustration with Michael Caine's casting in The Quiet American.

Lynn made chocolate chip cookies this morning; here they are. Nobody's fussy for Jude Law.

Try Hard Spun over Curlin in the Belmont

If you don't mind my saying so, I'm having a great spring picking horses. I picked Street Sense emphatically to win the Derby, and he did, emphatically. I also picked him to win the Preakness but expressed concerns about his post position and him tiring down the stretch because he would get strung out along the first turn with four speedsters inside of him---and that's what happened, he lost by half a head to Curlin---who is the prohibitive Belmont favorite.

Then I picked one of my favorite alltime horses, the five-year-old Buzzards Bay, to win the Californian last week; that happened too. So that's two winners out of three, missing the third race by half a head, but expressing lots of caution in that particular case.

Granted, every one of these picks was favorites. But they weren't short favorites; the best odds were on Buzzards Bay at 7-2. So now it's time to look at the Belmont, and finish this out in style.

I'm going with: Hard Spun.

Hard Spun won't be close to being the favorite. He'll go off around 3-1.

He finished second to Street Sense in the Derby on the track that Street Sense owns: Churchill Downs. When Street Sense ran away with the Derby as he ran away with the Breeder's Cup Juvenile on the same track, the wags at the Drawing Room had only this to say: he loves that track. Who wins that race if Street Sense doesn't love that track? Hard Spun, in a very tough field.

The Preakness also was a tough field, and Hard Spun had a hard run. Watch the replay: Hard Spun had to go out faster than he wished, to make sure Street Sense didn't get the rail around the first turn. Hard Spun ended up third, exhausted, behind the great but exhausted Street Sense and the perfect run of Curlin.

X-factor: Hard Spun has Native Dancer on not one but both sides of his bloodline. That's the second best horse ever. And that's just like Street Sense. Come from behind. Come from behind. Both sides of his line. He didn't like leading Street Sense around the turn at the Preakness. It won't happen in the Belmont.

Also note: Garrett Gomez, who had a great fall at Hollywood Park and a great spring at Santa Anita, and who in my mind is the top under-35 jockey in the sport right now, will be saddling Hard Spun for the first time. That indicates some disenchantment with venerable but ageing Mario Pino, who'se moving over to Pletcher's filly, Rags to Riches.

The pace for the Belmont will be very different, especially with no Street Sense to worry about. I'm thinking of a race a lot like Funny Cide and Empire Maker in the Belmont, where Hard Spun shuts out all the other horses and just hangs out behind Curlin all the way until they are comfortably in the stretch. It will be a slow time, because neither horse is going to break early, but both horses are much faster than the time they'll record.

In the rest of the Belmont field, the horse to watch is C P West.

I really doubt Pletcher has a chance with a filly. Last filly to win the mile and a half Belmont: Tanya. 1905. Granted, after 102 years, one's due, but Rags to Riches isn't even the best filly of 2007: Dreaming of Anna is.

And you bet: I'm very disappointed that Street Sense is skipping the Belmont. But what can you do?

Solutions

DaVinci, Unknown Jerome (detail): wiki here.)

To your health!

"All this stuff about 'smart cities,' to my way of thinking, is just total bullsh-t."--Mike Davis

To me too. Making civic density higher to clog city arteries in order to force people into public transportation---which is basically the current City Council approach---is like going on an all-pastrami diet to effectuate a heart attack so that you can reap the benefits of an exercise program later while convalescing.

I wrote something today at my column at MayorSam about the Weiss recall in CD 5 that is in the same vein. The problem in Century City is not only clogged arteries; it's also dirty rotten lying civic doctors. The politician's idea that building luxury condos in Century City helps check city growth is like a doctor telling you that, sure, you may be very sick, and of course this is a very sick City, but don't you worry!---because we're building the kind of facilities that will lure people healthier than you to town.

Listening to SteveAudio

Ten days ago, I wrote a post here in some haste---so what else is new? Then, about an hour later, I deleted it.

I was deeply disappointed in the Democrat's capitulation to the latest war funding bill in Congress. Very deeply. And I said so. Yet something stayed my hand an hour later...

Over the weekend, Steve Anderson at steveaudio.blogspot.com put up a post all about his own disappointment and sudden hesitancy about feeling disenfranchised from Democrats over the war funding bill.

~~~

For those of you who don't know, Steve (who lists his age as 250; I doubt that, only because I think I'm older than him, and I know I'm not 251) is a guy who does not have the highest profile blog (that will likely change soon, I think) but who has been doing yeoman's work behind the blogosphere scenes on behalf of progressives here in LA.

He's also recently added a few political bloggers to his stable; that's great, because Steve is an immensely together politcal being. And he's a music guy, too, which borders on paradox...

All that aside, what I'd like you to do is to read this super post about the war funding bill. It largely centers on Congressman Joe Sestak, a military minded Democratic Congressman from Pennsylvania who voted for the bill, initially disappointing many of us.

Congressman Sestak's contention, very well reasoned and drawing from abundant experience, is that to kill funding the war would have made our troops targets right up until the terminus postquem, and the US would have faced near catastrophic losses in the rush to get out.

Remember the road of death back to Baghdad in 1991? Something along that line, perchance. The risk to troops would have been enormously high.

All that said, keep SteveAudio's blog at the ready. That thing is going to take off. It's good to be there while it's still on the runway.

Gambling

Today Rodney and I went to see Peter Schickele's new work at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena, on the Gamble House grounds. (The house was more than a bit papered). I had an extra hour, so I poked about the Gamble House grounds.

The landscape around the Gamble House is a little like the interior semi-rooms at the Disney Hall: it's a space that often evokes the suggestion of sumptuousness without ever completely achieving it. I hadn't seen them in a while, but there are the paths that lead to nowhere and ceaselessly unoccupied lawns.

I'm probably the only person in LA who doesn't think much of the Gamble House, inside, outside, or grounds, but there you have it. You knew something was wrong with me anyway. But to me there's too much fakery in it, so much faux joining and faux massing and so little actual bungalow, only leading to crummy and pointless spaces, that I really can't stand it. But you are welcome to adore it, as you are everything that gets curb appeal proportions right, regardless of hundreds of other attendant problems.

(Oh, and the clinker brick! You like that? Really?)

The concert: fine. The World Premiere, for three cellos, was not bad, and I really liked the fourth movement. Peter said he wrote it on Prednisone, which did nothing for his health but seemed to help him compose. They also staged a fabled, very late Schubert quintet with two violins that is very symphonic in parts.

Then I had a Tommy burger in Eagle Rock, spilled mustard on my most absurdly expensive shirt (the second time it's been stained), kept the stain wet, and rushed it home to Lynn, who forces stains out on will power alone. This shirt has already been violated once, at an Oscar party. In that case, the hostess asked me to plunge a stubborn Bodum coffee press, I did, and up came the coffee, forcing Lynn and I both into the hostess's laundry room for a good half hour. In this case, Lynn only needed five minutes and a hanger. PS, it was worth it, I really enjoyed the Tommy burger, and parked on the sidewalk were four sparkling black-and-chrome tricked-out Harleys belonging to four West Coast Cubans.

Speaking of gambling, one of my favorite horses, Buzzards Bay, came in first yesterday in the Californian, as I predicted to Lynn earlier in the day. Again, no money down, dammit! She didn't feel so bad when she learned that even if I had gone to the track I wouldn't have wagered much anyway.

We missed Lisa this weekend.

A favored table

This is the kind of restaurant you need more than the other kinds: where the service is good and the food is imaginative, where there's thought behind every plate and wines by the glass that feel right for dinner, where the decor is unpretentious but venerable and everything is mostly quiet.

This is the kind of place Traxx---dos equis, like a railroad crossing---at Union Station is. We've heard good things about it from people in their forties ("Not part of any scene!" "Not pretentious!" "No 25-year-olds!") and all the good came true, even on a Saturday night at 8 p.m.

Everything sounded rather ordinary but was served in an extraordinary way. The Waldorf salad included the thinnest shavings of apple at the bottom, Point Reyes blue cheese and spiced walnuts. A venison carpaccio came with a light wasabi sauce. Even the roast chicken was very imaginative, somewhere closer to game hen and served with a cilantro pesto with avocado, pozole and pine nuts---and two fresh flour tortillas. A cheese plate on the dessert menu was a perfect finale. Among the wines by the glass were a Napa pinot noir, Aquinas, that tasted more of Burgundy than of Oregon or Paso Robles, and an Edna chardonnay that didn't just taste like apples but Pippins; two glasses wines that you are glad to drink over the course of a whole meal.

There's one table for two in a side bay where the person in the window gets to face the whole restaurant and the person facing the window gets to look out to all of the grand concourse of Union Station. The honor of having a chance to sit in a booth surrounded by the Union Station tile and terrazo, as this particular booth is situated, after a lifetime of pondering their magic (hell, we even have paintings of that stuff), may be lost on fans of Tom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss, but it suited me perfectly. That became one of my favorite tables in LA.

Though Lynn and I otherwise conspired as best as we could to ruin the day, Traxx did its best to save it. The bill for two: under a hundred.

A Welcome June Swoon

These are much quieter days for me. I commute nearly everywhere by bus or Metro, water the garden in the afternoons, and read. Latest book read was Gilles Deleuze's Pure Immanence and I'm working on an old book about the life of Thomas a Kempis and revisiting Annie Cohen-Solal's book on Sartre a lot. Lynn so often gets home late that I have lots of time alone.

The garden has a few things to recommend it even in late spring, especially this late spring. The nasturtiums haven't died yet, and the color combination of orange nasturtium against lavender society garlic bloom, all against the general green backdrop, is a fetching one. The sword and asparagus ferns aren't at all dry, all the trees are full of leaves, and the ivy and bougainvillea are all strong this time of year.

The surprising freeze of the third week of January has meant only a handful of apricots this June---last year, we made a dozen batches of about twenty-four apricots each to use in tarts and pastries. The freeze prevented the lime and lemon from budding at all this year, but we planted a second lemon---a dwarf Meyer---and the walnut tree is packed. Squirrels aren't getting to the walnuts nearly as much because our new neighbor Chip feeds them. They've opted for the lazy route.

I'm working a little on a novel; moreso than I was in the spring, but not enough yet for satisfactory progress. These days, I find it easier to write fiction in the garden than inside at the computer. I also work on a newspaper article about every other week or so, and have been widening my scope a bit in this department.

Mostly, I'm just glad May's done with. I am not a manic person, but it was a manic month.

Baudrillard

Baudrillard died earlier this year; I missed that; I must have been busy.

Read a biography of Sartre and you see this tradition in France: there are a few people who have immunity. They become veritable anti-ambassadors, untouchables of free thinking to the world.

"Shoot Sartre!" shouted demonstrators on the Champs-Elysses. "You do not imprison Voltaire," General de Gaulle said, a few months earlier, refusing to see in Sartre an ordinary French citizen.

--Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, 1987

Such also was Baudrillard.