The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do
determined to save
the only life you could save



-- Mary Oliver



With a h/t to my friends J and M, who saw Mary Oliver speak Thursday night at UCLA. Both cited this poem.  M said:   

The long poem called The Journey was particularly moving. It is so difficult to convey all that she is. I think she is like Thoreau in that she has developed her ability to observe by spending many solitary hours in nature.

My first visit to Orcas

 

This is my first visit to Orcas Island.

 

It stands at the north-western most tip of Washington state, just where it joins with Canada.  (That's Vancouver in the far distance).

I visited Coffelt's farm, introduced myself to the piggy-wigs...

...and the springy-flingy lambs.

I discovered a whole world in a garden fence.

I marvelled at the ubiquitous pink blossom (this one right outside the bootroom door and easily spy-able from the comfortable kitchen breakfast table).

And then we walked in the ancient forest of Moran State Park, with a diversion to Cascade Falls.

Orcas Island is warmer in winter and cooler in summer than the mainland.  It is an island full of potters, Tibetan prayer flags, painters, farmers, poets, and of course shellfish farmers.  

Lucy is planting a clam bed, and has been swatting up all morning about it.  

This afternoon we'll row out into the Sound to pick up the crab pots which we put out yesterday after stuffing the pots full of old pork chops and wodges of fat.

Breakfast is bread from Rose's and Coffelt Farm's Plum Lime Marmalade.

Forest, Orcas Island

Snow in the Vale of Aylesbury

 

received this morning from my mother: the view from her window

David Attenborough: The Amazing Lyrebird

Margaret Atwood posted this on Twitter. It's quite staggering. The amazing lyrebird can imitate all the other sounds it hears: car alarms, chain saws, kookaburra, in an elaborate display to woo a mate.

Paul Nash: The Elements

Paul Nash: The Elements 10 February 2010 - 9 May 2010 at The Dulwich Picture Gallery

I've fallen madly in love with Paul Nash and after reading the reviews, I realize I am not alone (see below).  If you live in London, please run to see this exhibition and do report back.

He's described in the same breath as Blake and  Samuel Palmer and his work is reminiscent of Charles Burchfield; finding the divine in nature.  He's called a surrealist, a war artist, a visionary. He depicted the horror of war but at the same time he liked the chalky downs of England, found the ancient there, and the magical.

This is from the review in The Telegraph:

Paul Nash is a peculiar, and peculiarly British, artist. Born in London in 1889, he lived a modest, itinerant life, staying with friends, or renting houses dotted across southern England. He became obsessed with features in the local landscape, such as the stone circles at Avebury, or chalky Ballard Down in Dorset, and always felt a profound connection with the history of his homeland. In his early twenties, he was already writing to a friend about the "strange enchantment" of the prehistoric earthworks at Wittenham Clumps in Oxfordshire, "a beautiful, legendary country haunted by old gods long forgotten".

and

his landscapes, many of which can be seen here, offer a curious blend of ancient and modern, of the hoary spirit of Albion dressed in up-to-the-minute fashions. A painting by Nash is at once timeless and unmistakably of its time: the artist conjured a rough-hewn, druidic magic, but his spells were cast in a 20th-century idiom. 

Whiteleaf Cross, The Chilterns

And this from Time Out:

his famous depiction of the rutted battlefields and scorched trees of Ypres, 'We Are Making a New World' of 1918, is as poetic as TS Eliot's 'Wasteland'

and

From solstice to equinox, night to day, Nash made his seas sing and his trees whistle.

 

People get very excited by Paul Nash's work. Note this, from the review in The Independent:

Still, the work is so spellbinding, it raises a question of belief. It goes beyond symbolism, beyond a theatrical shiver. It asks you, quite seriously: do you believe in ghosts?

Ghosts. All right, it's not the right word. I don't mean something white and flitting, or an armoured man with his head held under his arm. The presences in Nash-world are something far less defined and less definable. It is haunted all through. Or that's partly it. But I'm not sure that even Nash found the right words for his spell.

In his essay "The Life of the Inanimate Object", he wrote about "the endowment of natural objects, organic but not human, with powers or personal influences..."

And you have to love this (from the same review):

Nash gives us the kind of feeling that crop circles gave us, when they first appeared and their status was still obscure and unaccountable.

(h/t boojum: had i not read her FB update, i would not have known about this exhibit)

99 Things To Eat In LA Before You Die

 Los Angeles has the distinguished honor of being the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic Jonathan Gold.  His 99 Things To Eat In LA Before You Die in the LA Weekly has been thrown down as a challenge.  I intend to work my way through his list, um, methodically.  High on the list is Langer's hot pastrami, a delight I was introduced to by director James Gray many years ago.  Langer's simply has the best pastrami (and rye bread which they bake in-house) you'll find anywhere in the world.  Also, Zoe Nathan's Huckleberry which I've swooned over in this blog many times. (Woops, it's not open on Mondays -- twice I've made that mistake).

image of Huckleberry thanks to grubtrotters

Don't forget Jonathan Gold's essay in Saveur this month where he declares "Los Angeles is the best place in the world to eat at the moment."

I believe him.

The world is an illusion

"The world is an illusion, but it is an illusion which we must take seriously, because it is real as far as it goes...We must learn to come to reality without the enchanter's wand and his book of words. One must find a way of living in time without being completely swallowed up by time."

-- Aldous Huxley, on his deathbed

"Everything is connected."

-- Jeanette Winterson

Milky Way

Inner life

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.


-- William Carlos Williams

Just Say Hello

Modes of transportation I enjoy:

bike, horse, train, car, boat (small)

Modes of transportation I eschew:

plane, boat (large)

The plane thing happened years ago, long before 9/11, although that became an apposite reason and one to which I hold on like a tree in a hurricane.  And you know what really irks me? The people who say things like "planes are the safest way to travel."  Or "well the data proves that you're more likely to be killed crossing the street."  

This is what I say to those people: Up Your Bum.  Because it's not the fear of death that plagues me when any thought of an airplane enters my head, it's the fear of dying without having done something of worth on this little planet of ours.  I am well aware that the Buddhists allow that I will have other lives and other chances, but I don't really want to be in a plane crash where the papers the next day list me as a number ("Plane crashes across the Atlantic; Robbie Williams and 57 others die").  That would be a failure, in my humble opinion.

One of the things the New York Times did so well in the aftermath of September 11 is the marvelous obituaries -- vivid, personal, lively -- written about each and every person who perished, often with a photo.  In the photos the people were usually smiling. Funny how we do that when we see a camera, that urge to smile.  No-one looked sad.  We never think, this is the last picture that will be taken of me.  Death, as I'm fond of saying, always bites you in the arse.

So if there were a way to predict one's death (I've often imagined what life would be like if when walking down the street, an LED screen would light up on one's forehead with one's thoughts lit up in a glorious technicolor Palatino:  'Phwoar, he's a bit of all right.'  And 'Oh Dear Me, I should've peed before I left the house.'  And 'Bacon, bleach, loaf of bread, clothes pegs.'  And 'The square on the hypotenuse and what what was the next bit?') ...but if we knew. If there was a way of knowing, wouldn't we spend our every last moment in this world being just a little bit nicer to everyone?

Just say hello.  Try it for a day.  Everyone you meet.  People you're driving next to.  Look over at them and smile.  Wave when people let you into traffic. Talk to that homeless guy you always pass on the corner of Crescent Heights & Sunset Blvd.  Ask the cashier how her day's going.  Call your brother.  Grin at the ferocious lady with the whippets in the dog park.  Share your Kit-Kat.

After all, dogs do it. 

The Children

Seen at a Persian bookstore on Westwood Blvd today.

Bindu Wiles' blog: Why is it so difficult to write?

This is interesting (Bindu Wiles answers a reader's questions):

* Why is it so hard to write even when it is the thing I most want to do?
There are endless reasons, and some that are common to all writers and others that are specific to you. I can only answer the ones common to all writers, but I think each writer must answer for herself the specific why’s as to the difficulty of writing. Self-knowledge is an imperative for a writer. It’s my opinion that the extent that we know ourselves is the extent we can know our characters (in fiction), and other people (in non-fiction). You cannot be a really good writer without a whole bunch of looking inward, although people try it all the time, and in my opinion, the result is writing that is shallow or undeveloped and ultimately uninteresting.
Some of the common reasons; (I am a non-fiction writer so therefore am going to address that genre here)
-to sit in a chair alone not speaking to anyone for hour after hour is plain old difficult.
-Grace Paley once said in a workshop I was in that the state that writers need to be in to work, is the state that most people are paying therapists to get out of.
-writing in particular is an art form that creates something from absolutely nothing. We make worlds with little black marks on the page and they have to make sense, be emotional, and touch something universal as well as reveal something personal.
- the level of vulnerability is hard to live with.

Read the full post here.

Bishop Alan’s Blog: Six Days in Lent

I found this interesting quote today:

This year our diocese is encouraging everyone to rediscover ways to sustain the sacred centre. This could induce Narcissism and Tea Light Overdrive, but it’s an important task. Humanly speaking, the whole life of the Church is powered by passion, prayer and spiritual conviction. If faith becomes thin and stringy, we will soon lose the plot, and with it, the means to be a transformative community.bishopalan.blogspot.com, Bishop Alan’s Blog: Six Days in Lent, Feb 2010

You should read the whole article.

Chris Burden at BCAM at LACMA

I love Chris Burden's street light installation outside of the Broad Contemporary at LACMA.

(photo taken by iPhone)

Read Dana Goodyear's New Yorker piece here.

Millay: Sonnet XLIII

Sonnet XLIII

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was born today in 1892 and was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (with grateful thanks to @mhsteger)

Urban Chickens

A post on The Tangled Nest blog (by Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of Crow Planet) reminds me how much I miss our chickens.  It's a marvelous piece about building an urban chicken coop (which has been painted in gay shades of green and red and looks thoroughly inviting).

She also offers advice to urban chicken farmers about rats, which was the reason we had to get rid of our chickens (fear not, they went to a happier place, and I do not mean that euphemistically).  They come for the eggs and the chicken feed and finally, there was little we could do but put down traps and poison.  The canyons surrounding Los Angeles are famous for their large ratticus norvegicus populations. Huge families of the things. I'm not really squeamish about them but they are, frankly, a drag.

Our chickens were a mixture of Easter chicks from schoool (yes, we were the nimrods who agreed to look after them "for the weekend"), hand-raised araucana hens and scrappety hens rescued from the pound.  Together, however, they delivered 8 or 9 eggs a day in shades of brown, blue and green.  As we have a family of red-tailed hawks nearby, and of course coyotes and raccoons, it is imperative that the chicken run is completely covered in wire netting.

Now that spring is here, I'm looking forward to hand-raising some more chicks or perhaps following in the steps of my younger brother who has adopted battery hens, with much success.  He didn't knit them sweaters but did have to put a special heat lamp in their coop because of the freezing winter temperatures (and their lack of feathers).

The Rottal Hens (decidedly non-Urban)

If you live in the UK, you can adopt a battery hen here at the Battery Hen Welfare Trust.


If you're in Southern California, you can adopt a hen here at Petfinder.

Will Self on Writing

An excellent series in the Guardian asks authors for their 10 rules for writers.  Note Will Self's number five:

5 You know that sickening feeling of inadequacy and over-exposure you feel when you look upon your own empurpled prose? Relax into the awareness that this ghastly sensation will never, ever leave you, no matter how successful and publicly lauded you become. It is intrinsic to the real business of writing and should be cherished.

15 & 16

How I believe in God by Roger Ebert

I read this piece by Roger Ebert to my darling husband, the Maharishi, as he made himself a late breakfast this morning (I always like it when Skype conference calls to Argentina keep him home and I wander in from my office to sit with him). As I read it out loud, I found myself in tears by the end. It's an intelligent piece about God and science and the incredible beauty of the Universe. Click here.

Can Bumble bees fly?

On the physics of bumble bee flight, via npr:

Annie Dillard on Church

(as quoted by Rev. Gabriel Ferrer at All Saints, Beverly Hills during today's Ash Wednesday service)

Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute?

The tourists are having coffee and doughnuts on Deck C. Presumably someone is minding the ship, correcting the course, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, avoiding icebergs and shoals, fueling the engines, watching the radar screen, noting weather reports radioed in from shore. No one would dream of asking the tourists to do these things. Alas, among the tourists on Deck C, drinking coffee and eating donuts, we find the captain, and all the ship's officers, and all the ship's crew.

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no-one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews.

from Teaching A Stone To Talk

Fifteen

 

Minks. Age 11.

Time marked is, somehow, time not lost to its own ravages (it goes something like that anyway) so that when I think about the fact that my little girl -- the one that I had five years after her brother, when my office was in the garage and I used to feed her at my desk and she'd fall asleep on me while I was on conference calls trying to appear professional but all the while staring down at her perfect little milk-drunk face -- is now fifteen years old and that she will have her driver's permit six months from now, it is all a tiny bit surreal.  On Valentine's Day, on a suprisingly springy and optimistic Southern California afternoon, accompanied by loud and competitive tweeting of birds, dogs being driven crazy by squawking squirrels, and lazy sun on the yellow acacias, we sat with our knees underneath ourselves on the deck, warming out wintery bodies, and she said to me "I'm not sure about this getting older thing, Mamma."  Her brow is knotted and she's looking down at the cyclamens on the table (planted by her at Christmas 2008 and still strong).  "I'm sort of not excited about it."  Fifteen is daunting. It's not thirteen when you're a teenager and you can thumb your nose at the world.  It's that age when the doctor is asking whether you're having your hpv vaccines and your friends are "hooking up" with boys, both real and imagined, when girls not much older than you are strutting gaunt down runways and staring, glossy-lipped and wanton into men's cameras.  It's the age when you start being self-conscious and you feel grumpy in the morning if you haven't eaten anything but if you have you worry that your tummy is too fat.  It's the age where you stare at your boobs and wonder if they'll grow more and if they do, whether you'll like that. It's when you worry about using the right products on your skin and hope that you don't get really bad acne and if you give up soda for Lent maybe you won't?

 

Pierre Auguste Renoir: 

Gabrielle with a Rose, 1911

currently showing at LACMA

She sees so much.  ("I think that woman was more than a nanny to Renoir's children" she said at the museum on Monday as we looked at a painting of a woman with a high blush in her cheek, her blouse open to reveal a full breast.  I laughed.  "You should be doing the audio tour" I replied.)  Feels so much.  Cares about everything.

I am so ridiculously proud of this person.

Happy Birthday Baby Girl!

Minky is 15 today.

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Spring in Little Tujunga Canyon, California

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

I am on page 112.
Is anyone else struggling with this book? It is brilliantly written,
oh yes, but I find myself craving the novel equivalent of "Love,
Actually" on this Valentine's Day Eve.

Miss Handbag's Meat Loaf

I dug this out of my old blog, from July 2004.  This is a world famous meatloaf  from my friend Lynn, who is a writer for the NY Times.  She doesn't use the internet (no, really) and wrote it out, rather romantically, on a 3x5 card, like a lady from the WI.  At the top she wrote:

Dear Miss Whistle: feel free to put this in your sure-to-be-a-bestseller cook book. Love, Miss Handbag.

Miss Handbag's Meat Loaf

(I always double this or even triple the recipe)


3/4 cup minced green onions

1/2 cup " white or yellow onions

1/2 cup " carrot
1/4 cup " celery

1/4 cup " red pepper
1/4 cup " green pepper

2 tsp " garlic

4 tablespoons butter

1 tsp ground black pepper

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1/4 tsp ground cumin

1/4 tsp ground nutmeg

1lb lean chuck (ground)*

1/2 lb lean ground pork

1/2 cup catsup

1/2 cup breadcrumbs

3 eggs beaten

* I use grassfed or organic beef


Preheat oven to 350. In a skillet saute onions, carrot, celery, peppers and garlic in the butter until very soft and beginning to brown. Cool to room temp. When cool, stir in black pepper, cayenne, cumin and nutmeg. In a large bowl combine vegetables with ground chuck, pork, catsup, breadcrumbs and eggs. Form into a loaf pan (or whatever shape suits you) and bake for 70-80 minutes. It can take longer (especially if you double the recipe) so check by the clean knife method.

Note: you can double up on ingredients if you're missing something -- for instance, 1/2 cup red pepper, if you don't have green. 
Meat Loaf is forgiving. 


Enjoy! (It's addicting)

Power

We've had no power in the canyon since late last night. A eucalyptus
tree fell around Laurel Canyon Place across the road downing a power line.
Laurel Canyon is closed southbound (towards the city) at Mulholland
and Mulholland is closed westbound at Laurel Canyon because of an
enormous sinkhole/landslide. So, getting out is fine but getting in
involves coming from Coldwater and down Laurel Pass.

On top of this my nearly 15 yr old threw up this morning (after
downing an enormous slice of her chocolate ganache and raspberry pie
last night). Nevertheless we drove to the barn this morning with me
  channelingmy mother "some fresh air will make you feel better". She
became increasingly greener and weaker and we drove in, turned round
and drove back. Thank God for plastic doggy poo bags and handgun
target practise with her father. She threw up again at the
intersection of the I-5 and the CA-170 while travelling at 70 mph
managing somehow to do a William Tell with about three pints of
raspberry-colored fluid.

But it's nice to sit in the garden with the dogs, listening to the
birds and squirrels and updating my blog by iPhone. The lines may come
out a little jiggly. They always do. We went to fetch tea from the
Coffee Bean this morning and sat together, the Maharishi and me, on
the deck watching the red-tailed hawks building a new nest in our
eucalyptus (the pine trees on the Horseshoe Canyon ridge are dying due
to beetle infestation; Mr & Mrs Hawk had to find new accommodation).
Minks is now safe in bed reading Twilight for the 18th time, bucket
with a splash of Dettol in the bottom, just like matron used to do it,
by her side. The sun is out. I could learn to love this.

Attraction

Tiltrekning
  G208-4. Tiltrekning II (1896)

Edvard munch

Seeing Nature in Los Angeles

(photo by me from San Vicente Mountain Park, Encino)

Here is a wonderful essay: Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA by Jenny Price in The Believer magazine.

For Valentine's Day

How Carl and Annie Sagan fell in love, making the ultimate mix tape (via NPR by way of Wendy).

"It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like to beings of perhaps 1,000 million years from now," Druyan says. "If that didn't raise goose bumps, then you'd have to be made out of wood."

This is the blog of a dilettante. Sorry.

One of my very good friends, M, a woman of exquisite style married with a sense of humor and a need to ingest many, many books (a brilliant and winning combination in my mind) suggested to me yesterday that my blog used to be far more social and domestic -- all about dinner parties and jolliness -- and now it's more introspective and full of poetry and photography.  I thought about this a little bit and I do agree that she has a point, but one of the hardest things I've found is that there are so many things in life that interest me, so many things that I want to devote time to, so many things I feel passionate about that I find it hard to settle on just one or even just three.

 this is Jack

For example, yesterday I discovered the most mouthwatering blog dedicated only to ramen -- pages and pages of ramen and meticulous reviews restaurants that serve ramen. On his suggestion, my son and I went out to lunch at Kyushu Ramen on Sherman Way and Sepulveda, in a somewhat sketchy part of Van Nuys.  To illustrate this point, we spotted twenty seven police cars, two police helicopters and about 50 officers both in uniform and plain clothed that were operating some kind of a sting right outside the strip mall at which we intended to dine.  It didn't matter one iota.  The Shoyu Ramen was delicious, topped with slices of chashu pork and spinach.  The order of kyoza dumplings with minced pork and green herbs came out piping hot, hand delivered by the chef himself, and couldn't have tasted moister or fresher.  I marvel at Keizo and his blog and admire grately his ability to be passionate about one topic only.

Sadly I am not that way and so my postings leap all over the place.  There is so much that interests me, I fear I may have some kind of attention deficit disease.  Yesterday for example, I marvelled at Ted Connover talking about his book The Routes of Man on PRI's The World, waxed rhapsodic over Jonathan Gold's suggestion that Los Angeles is currently the food capital of the world, and listening to a podcast from Speaking of Faith (public radio) on Approaching Prayer, stopping in my driveway at 11 o'clock at night to hear the end of it, so rapt was I.  And yet, and yet, I get anxious and re-arrange my house, drag in boughs of yellow mimosa so we can all experience it before it dies, worry about my dog's medial luxating patella, eagerly read updates from my daughter's school trip to the Sequoia National Forest, am planning a big family dinner for Sunday night (Valentine's Day and would be the 22nd wedding anniversary of J's father & Sandy), am pissed off that Mulholland is closed due to a landslide, and worry about the de-civilization of the world.  At least three times a week I imagine chapters in my imaginary book "New Modern Manners for the Nouveau Pauvre" and frequently overshare with friends about what I consider bad behaviour. Oh, I am a frightful hypocrite.  I smoke two cigarettes each night, while sitting on the stoop wondering about a scientific approach to global food and health distribution, while at the same time speed-reading John Mayer's mind-blowingly awful interview in Playboy in which he admits to having a racist penis.

And all the time trying to eek out chunks of time for writing the real stuff, other than the perfect hour spent at 8am daily in the presence of my dear writer friend W.  Even when I walk I fill notebooks with ideas, try to jiggle connections between characters and places, and things I've seen that I feel have to be included.  I wake up at night worrying about how long this has taken, how many times kind friends say "and how is that book coming along" and me having to mumble something clever.  There are so many stories you see, so many things pulling at me for my attention, and I cannot write them all.  I take heart from the blog of Tania Kindersley who is so sage and kind and forgiving on this subject.  I think of the women who don't write their first books until well into their sixties. Oh, there's that, I think. I have 20 years!  And then slump into a depression.  I even gave up for a week, went away, saw my mother and my bf Jack, swam in the sea with my son, walked a dog called Ears along impossibly white beaches, stared at sunsets, read people like Woolf and McCann, flew over Haiti while reading Greene, thought about that too much.  Came home, back to my hut, and back to my work.

 (image nicked gratefully from Tania Kindersley's blog)

And so, dear reader, I don't really fit into any of the blog boxes. This is the blog of an enthusiastic dilettante. Sorry.  But, you see, I am a great fan of that quote by Charles Eames:

Eventually everything connects - people, ideas, objects. The quality of the connections is the key to quality per se.

Thank you for sticking with me & for sticking it to me when I get it wrong. I am a ball of gooey, cuddly gratitude.

Let The Great World Spin

 

Colum McCann's book, which had me breathless, the great swooping elegance of it all, has been deemed by more than one esteemed writer as the greatest book written about New York City.  I tend to agree.  The attack on the Twin Towers looms large in our collective consciousness -- it's a living myth or mythical-sized real life horror.  It stays with all of us, whether we were there in New York on that horrible morning, or whether we were home, watching CNN, worrying about our loved ones.  There is an image in McCann's book of wirewalker Phillipe Petit between the two towers as a plane flies over head.  It is a heart-stopping foreshadowing of the events that would occur.  Using Petit's 1974 walk between the towers as a central event which unites all the characters as they witnessed it, McCann manages to created a sense of foreboding, of dramatic irony even, as all along I imagined a crescendo of a 9/11 scenario at the end of the book (it doesn't come).  It's a book about flawed characters, all of whom, without exception are trying to do the right thing but struggling along the way. It's about love and redemption, rich in characters and layers and places, beautifully, beautifully written.   I am reading it for a second time now, eager to soak up every little detail that I may have missed the first time.

mimosa in laurel canyon

The mimosa is so beautiful that I've brought it inside:

An easy soup: Pasta e Fagioli

As my friend Andrea knows, as I secretly revealed this to her, the horror of it, the creeping-around-ness of it, I like to drive to Santa Monica to pay homage to Guido Marcello, the purveyor of Italian foods that hides away off of Olympic Boulevard, not for the exquisite proscuitto or the Italian truffles or even the handmade breads, but for the simple packets of Star-brand pasta e fagioli, an reconstituted-yet-exotic version of Cup-a-Soup.

The simple truth is that pasta e fagioli, the most warming soup one can imagine, a hearty blend of beans and pasta, infused with rosemary and olive oil, is impossibly easy to make.  I adapted this recipe by Giada Di Laurentiis.  It takes about 30 minutes.  I leave the little cheesecloth packet of rosemary and thyme just a little longer than she does, and added swiss chard to boost the winter anti-oxidants (and provide some color).  But it's a cinch.

rain/bow

 

and it rained all day

i lit the fire

listened to radio four

(melvyn bragg)

and ventured out in it

at about four

reluctantly

marketed

(papayas, swiss chard, red beans)

and then saw the rainbow

over universal city

with snowy peaks

behind

not bad,

huh?

Persephone

-- Duncan Grant

Lillian Bassman

The Los Angeles Times reviews an exhibit of 93 year-old Lilian Bassman's exquisite work (at the Peter Fetterman Gallery in Santa Monica) here. 

The Happiness Project -- Merton

I've just started Gretchen Rubin's marvellous book, The Happiness Project.
And this wonderful Thomas Merton quote is from her blog:

“Finally I am coming to the conclusion that my highest ambition is to be what I already am. That I will never fulfill my obligation to surpass myself unless I first accept myself, and if I accept myself fully in the right way, I will already have surpassed myself.”

-- Thomas Merton, Journal, October 2, 1958

the madness, the melancholia

I have forsaken you for over a week.
It was an indulgence.
A short holiday with my mother and son and best friend (and son's godfather). 
I didn't write for a full eight days. 
But I read -- Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Colum McCann (Let the Great World Spin), Graham Greene (The Comedians); more about all of those later. 
I leave you with this:

“Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those, who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear, which is inherent in a human condition."

-- Graham Greene