Eyeing The Volcano

Those who want check up on what Mount St. Helens is currently up to should look at the VolcanoCam which is situated on a ridge about five miles from the peak. When I checked it this morning there was a large and ominous cloud tapering away from one side of the summit.

Four hurricanes, a volcano that is becoming feisty, and a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in the past several weeks. Are the gods speaking to the United States, or what?

Change Of Scenery

A note for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Plants In Place.

They’ve started to cut the corn. When I returned home in the evening, the edge of the field near the road was down and the harvester had just started cutting a swath into the interior. Before we settled in to listening to baseball for the evening, Pica and I walked up the road to the levee. Pica mentioned that it would be time for the coyotes, and on cue, they started howling. Several of them. Two trains were passing, and as is their wont, the coyotes howled at the trains. Walking back to the house, we saw one of them trit-trotting out into the alfalfa field to the south, looking in fine fettle. They know there’s feasting to be had once the corn is down. The crows meanwhile will get their own surprise. Two of Pica’s coworkers brought down a fancy new live trap to catch crows as part of ongoing research on West Nile Virus. The trap is right now near the English walnut tree in our yard, but will be moved out into the field once the corn is down.

And soon we’ll have our view back.

The Hordes Arrive

The students are back for the fall on campus. Classes begin Thursday—relatively late, but we’re on the quarter system, and move-in day was yesterday. Lots of freshman all over the place, carrying large cardboard numbered boxes from the Memorial Union full of orientation goodies and pre-ordered textbooks. A clutch of students bearing said boxes meet in the hallway of the MU, all of the programming each others’ number into their cell phones. Long lines at the Coffeeshop bakery during my 3 PM cookie run. And the terror of barely competent cyclists meeting their first campus roundabout during the noontime rush hour.

But in my windowless interior office, I barely notice it all.

L.A. in a Day

I flew down to Burbank this morning to see my high school English teacher. My high school in England, that is, the progressive co-ed boarding school I fetched up in when my parents got too frightened by the sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll at my school in Madrid (it was there with similar prevalence at Abbotsholme, but by then I was committed to the long, cold, damp Derbyshire winter, and decided to worry them no further).

This teacher has recently retired as head of an even more prominent, progressive co-ed boarding school in England and has decided to take an M.A. through York University on 18th century theatre. We spent a lot of time today at the Huntington Library, just beyond Pasadena.

It’s something when you get to enthuse over the Ellesmere Chaucer—the real one, not a facsimile—with your high school ENGLISH teacher, the one who, 25 years ago, read The Knight’s Tale in a convincingly Chaucerian accent (though, what did WE know about authentic Middle English accents?), to have him take you on a pilgrimage to see Reynolds’ portrait of Mrs. Siddons, to share the joy of blooming cacti. It was a great day.

Fall’s Coming

I heard our first Say’s phoebe of the winter on Monday, its single plaintive cry echoing off the beehives. And the white-crowned sparrows are starting to come in—within two weeks there will be hundreds. They sing all winter long.

They have STILL not harvested the corn out back. It’s now a light wash of burnt sienna in color, if not in mass. When you go near it the weight of every single ear produces a rustle, so even when there’s no breeze you hear a permanent crackling. No wonder so many phantasmagoric movies involve cornfields. I’m not worried about phantasms, but cats do still seem to be emerging. The latest is a gray tabby kitten with spots, lovely to look at, with the long-legged gangle teenager affect.

I set a trap on Tuesday, pretty half-heartedly I must admit (what am I going to do with THIS one?). In the morning I saw I’d caught something—surely the kitten? No. It was a teenage possum, which promptly played dead when I tried to let it out. It played dead for about 1/2 hour after I’d gone back inside, its mouth open in a less than credible tooth-filled rictus and its eyes looking glassy and gone. But it slipped out while I wasn’t looking. Given the chances of catching a skunk so near the house, am I going to continue to try to catch the gray tabby?

White Shark Comes To Monterey

The Monterey Bay Aquarium placed a young white shark on exhibit a week ago Tuesday, and she is doing well. This shark was accidentally caught by a commercial halibut fisherman off Southern California in August, and then transferred to an ocean holding pen used by the aquarium as part of their study on white sharks. The four-foot four-inch, 62 pound shark has been eating consistently since arriving at the aquarium, which is remarkable as this is the first time a white shark has fed while being on exhibit. The aquarium hopes to keep the shark on exhibit long-term, but that depends on how well she continues to do.

Questing For Bookshops

An entry for the Ecotone Wiki topic on Places for Books.

These next two weekends we’re busy so any field trip to Powell’s will have to wait for a while. But such an imagined trip leads one to ask where are the truly great bookstores, the ones worth making long journeys to visit? Powell’s is clearly one, but others? Here are a couple of resources that may help.

Evelyn C. Leeper edits an annotated list of bookstores of the world. This list seems fairly comprehensive and is updated frequently.

More selectively, Robert Teeter has a personal bookstore hall of fame. I’m glad to see I’ve been to a few of them.

I’m sure there are other such lists out there, but this is a start.

Ivan

My brother used to live in New Orleans, where he and one of his many international roommates washed windows for a living (he had just finished university in England and this was his first stop in the U.S.). They lived in the French Quarter, in an apartment with high ceilings and exposed brick walls.

He’s fetched up in Juneau, Alaska many years, and many stops, later. But he and his wife are in New Orleans now, visiting following a conference she’s been attending. One of the largest hurricanes recorded in the Atlantic is heading their way. I hope they decide to leave sooner rather than later; New Orleans could be a swimming pool of sewage, industrial waste, and floating coffins. Not likely, but possible. I’d rather they not be around to find out.

(Postscript, September 15: They’re safe in Seattle, will finish their vacation there and head home on Saturday.)

Piggyes Bones

One of the wonderfully unpredictable discoveries of a commonality with Siona is an interest in bones and skeletons. She took a quick look through our sketchbooks on Saturday and said without hesitation “wild boar” at the sketches of a skull, one of which is pictured at left.

I’m not sure what it means that we both went into raptures over the bad taxidermy at Harvard’s Peabody Museum.

Bloggers In The Marin Bookstore

Today we travelled to Corte Madera in Marin County to meet Maria Benet who writes the blog Alembic (which we always pronounce “alembique”). We met in the bookstore Book Passage, perhaps the best independent bookstore in Marin County, which as is the bookstore fashion these days, has its own little caf, perfect for long conversation. It was a lively literary conversation: we talked about everything from publishing poetry to the banality of the book club scene. After sitting in the caf for a while, we wandered the store, where we introduced her to Jasper Fforde (we ourselves bought a copy of The Well of Lost Plots, while she went home with the first book in the Thursday Next series, The Eyre Affair). We both left with a copy of the short story in verse, The True Tale of a Tough Tiburon Tabby, illustrated by the San Francisco cartoonist Phil Frank.

Afterwards, we had lunch at Il Fornaio, all of us having eggs for brunch. (Maria’s dinner plans were to have a salad of arrugula, feta cheese, and figs; Pica thought was a very Marin County sort of salad to have, and it inspired us to have our own dinner of arrugula, mixed greens, and blue cheese). We then ferried her home up the steepest hill Nellie has yet to climb. Marin County is a great place to live if you love hills, with Mt. Tamalpais dominating the view from their house. Alas, housing is only affordable there if you happened to have moved there twenty years ago.

Above we have a photo of us three bloggers staring at Alembic on one of Maria’s laptops (the Benets have a geek’s paradise of an home office, with more computers and tech books than one can count).