Word of the week.

While I'm here, let me add my word of the week, which was:

amorphous

I picked myself up using the same word multiple times in classes and in comments on student papers - from describing the work of the "Misty" poets to commenting on the state of the papers themselves.

When you spend your weeks continually grasping for words in front of an audience, you notice yourself forming new speech habits all the time. Some of them you can't get rid of too quickly - like my repeated use of "if you will" to end my off-the-top-of-my-head descriptions of poetic or historical tendencies in lectures this term - a habit that has irritated me but been difficult to shake off. Do the students notice? I doubt most are listening anyway.

Yes, some of my lectures this term have been quite amorphous. But just one more week to go.

Tree monkeys

The wildlife in my garden this summer...


Now the trees are bare, and my lawn is covered in leaves.

Sqnowcat

Squid in the snow.

Snow day!

We're having a large snowfall here that has closed the university again today (woo hoo!). Yesterday morning we all stared at our mobile phones hoping for that automated message, but it didn't come and we all dutifully trecked to work. When I came out of my first class and was gearing up for the always last minute rush for the second, longer one, I opened my email and discovered they'd decided to close after all from 2 p.m., the start time of that class. And there was great rejoicing.

Crazy woman across the street

I took my cat for a walk tonight. And he went with me, harnessed and leashed, quite happily trotting along by my side. I'd always suspected he might be suited to it, but was too embarrassed to try. Still, I'm pretty sure we've already convinced the neighbours that we're strange and foreign, since we've been taking the cats out into the back garden with harnesses and tie-outs for a few months now, and I’ve spent a good deal of time running in circles round the apple tree dragging lures behind me. It's a small step from that to final certifiable cat-walking insanity, though notably I still needed the cover of darkness to try it. It was an entirely lovely experience.

In fact, for the past two or three weeks I’ve been taking both cats out into the garden morning and evening without harnesses, having discovered that one isn’t too quick at working out how to climb over the fence (though he makes daily forays into the apple tree, from which he has to be rescued), and the other is generally happy to sit around watching things pass by. They like being out there, and I want them to get that exercise and stimulation as much as possible - but if I can find a compromise that stops them being squished by a car or rejoining that huge lost cat population we glimpsed when we were adopting, I’ll take it. Even if I do look crazy.

Storm

We had a sudden storm on Monday night. It's nothing unusual here - thunder and lightning is common on summer afternoons and evenings, though there seems to have been more this year than most. As a result things have been unusually lush and green, though the sun has begun to bake the grass yellow in the last couple of weeks.

Monday's storm came through at about 10 at night. We could hear the wind and sudden heavy rain, and then the lights started to flicker on and off before going out altogether. I haven't been in a power-cut worthy of the name since I was a child, so it was exciting to light candles and brush my teeth by torchlight and worry about whether the fish in the freezer would all have to be barbecued the next day and where I could possibly have put my battery powered radio. Unfortunately, it was a little too close to bedtime to enjoy it to the full. Lying in bed and watching the lightning through the blinds was fun, though. I woke up sometime in the middle of the night with the bedside light shining in my eyes.

Afterwards I looked at Denver Post reports about the damage caused, including this one this morning. I thought that they must be somewhat sensationalized, going on about fallen trees and windows being blown out of buildings just a few roads west of here - after all, the only effects visible in my garden were some extra bits of next-door's tree scattered around my lawn, and my tomato plant knocked a little askew. However, we learned otherwise when went for a bike ride along the Clear Creek Trail, a trail from Denver to Golden that passes to the north of us through a particularly nice wooded area by a small river - part of Wheat Ridge's green belt. The path was officially closed due to "hazardous conditions," and there were fallen trees everywhere - uprooted, snapped in two, lying over the path or in the river. There was one resting on the corner of some unfortunate person's roof nearby. At some points the path was carpeted with fallen leaves, giving a whole new meaning to the term "green belt."




There is a "no swimming" sign planted by some of the small lakes that this path goes past.


I like the way that it manages to look as if it's OK to swim, as long as you don't expect to be happy. Or, Beware of Octopus.

California

The sea, the sea!

Last month we took a brief trip to California. I was giving a paper at a conference in Orange County, and we stayed on for a couple of days to see Los Angeles and its environs.

We flew into John Wayne Airport, Orange County. My first impressions as we drove to our hotel were that it was both like and unlike the greater Los Angeles area I had imagined. I'd expected it to be all roads and cars, which of course it was, but it was strange beyond that. There was lush greenery all around, towering palm trees lining streets and surrounding buildings, beautifully tended bushes spilling flowers - but at the same time it felt oddly dead. Office blocks, apartment blocks, hospitals - they take up huge spaces, with wide roads in between them, so that they somehow seem like so many remote islands; of course, it doesn't help that there is minimal sign of people moving between them, other than in their cars. The built-up area seems to fill up all the space between the mountains and the sea, and yet there seems to be nothing there. It's a good place to produce films concerned with illusive realities.

We stayed relatively near Laguna Beach, though of course to get there (or anywhere else) you had to get in a car and drive. In fact, most of the time we spent there was in the car, driving along one freeway or another, only to get somewhere from which we had to drive back. Even the Pacific Coast Highway has only the rarest scenic glimpses. It mostly looks like this:

Overall, it seems untenable. There are lanes and lanes of cars on freeway after freeway, all those people going in the same direction but individually powered by a non-renewable resource. There's no point in calling for more public transport in such a place; either technology has to change, or the whole place will be left an abandoned monument to the strange way people used to live. Somehow it was easy to imagine distant generations marvelling over a deserted landscape of huge empty roads.

Still, there are lovely places amidst the general dystopian monstrosity of it all. The coves around Laguna Beach, with their flourishing greenery, were beautiful.

By the pier at Santa Monica, the sea was dotted with strange seal-people bobbing up and down in the water:


And sitting on the railings at the end of the pier, we saw this juvenile pelican, with its beautiful beady eyes.

We also went to the Getty, where I was happy to come across James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels. Afterwards we took a quick drive through the Hollywood area. Once is enough! In spite of being right next to all those residential areas of the rich, Hollywood Boulevard itself is a grimy tourist strip that you can see for yourself if you imagine Oxford Street and then add in the worst of the souvenir shops on the Royal Mile.

Reading signs

From when I first started driving in the U.S., I noticed that there is a much greater reliance on words for road signs than on the kinds of symbols you'd see in Britain, Europe or - I suspect - pretty much anywhere else. For instance, "right lane must turn right" is usually indicated by a sign that reads "right lane must turn right," and if like me you have a tendency to confuse right and left when they are presented in words rather than in symbols that relate directly to your symmetrical existence, you often find yourself embarking on little adventures on streets you'd never intended to visit. Things get even more confusing, however, when words get combined with symbols. The above is my favourite, a sign on a road passing through the middle of my university. Whenever I pass it, I get so distracted by trying to decode it that I run the risk of ploughing through the crowd of students it is trying to warn me to avoid.

The Eco Zoo

Last night I searched for online pop-up books and found this one, Ecodazoo. Why aren't there more sites like this one? Or are there?

Polar Bears

Memorial Day weekend, and the academic year is almost over. Hurray! I have such a light load this term, but I have had to see the same small group of students four days a week for a twenty-week stretch since New Year, with only one week's break in the middle - and much as I like them, I think we're all due for a rest from each other. If their idiosyncrasies wear on me after this time, presumably mine wear on them just as much.

Memorial Day - what is that? I've tried asking this before (and all those bank holidays in the UK - do you know what they're for?), but I'm still not very clear. If you watched TV, you'd think it was for buying cut-price mattresses. Actually, it seems officially to be for honouring war dead. Two years ago I ran in the Bolder Boulder 10k race on Memorial Day, and many people had marked on their t-shirts the names of family members who had fought in a war; and at the stadium spectacle that followed, there was military display and parachuting in with big rippling American flags and a lot of clapping and cheering (woo hoo!). Oh, it's also a marker of summer - someone said to me that you can assume it safe to plant after Memorial Day. My plants are planted, though - I have a little herb garden going in the back yard.

Anyway, as to those polar bears....
Yesterday we went to see the film Earth, otherwise known as Disney's Earth (warning bells!), otherwise known (depending on where you are) as BBC's Earth. J. saw this in Germany last year, and had said how beautiful it was - but for a long time when we searched for it online all we could find was BBC's Planet Earth. Only after we saw it at the cinema yesterday did we manage to look further into its origins. It appears to be substantially a re-edit of footage from the Planet Earth series done for the big screen, with an attempt to shape it into a natural epic of struggle and survival, heart-warming stories of mother-and-child migration, with a good dose of polar bear tragedy and the odd comic bird.

I've never see the whole of the Planet Earth series, to my regret - just bits of it here and there. I know enough about it, though, to know that it focuses on different areas of the planet as the series progresses, presumably giving it an overall sense of depth and breadth that was lacking in this film version. Well, there was breadth, of sorts - but a strange lack of unity in the whole, as if they had their three main mother-and-child stories (polar bear, elephant, humpback whale), and then added in other things by way of weak thematic links to try and make it long enough (migration theme: cut to migrating demoiselle cranes struggling over Himalayas; seasonal change: cut to the Papua New Guinea rain forest without seasons, and laugh at some dancing birds of paradise).

Things were picked up and then dropped again - near the beginning was a sequence on the boreal forest of... wait... where? I didn't catch it, and it never came up again, but it's supposed to be the biggest forest on earth (do they mean the entire boreal zone?), supplying 30% of the world's oxygen... or some such figure. But not much animal life can eat those conifer needles, so now we speed off to somewhere else, by way only of a shot of a lynx and a comment about the spirit of the wilderness (Wait! What does he eat, if there's nothing here to leave footprints, as you say?).

Well, it's at least very beautiful. And distinctly emotional at times, including that polar bear tragedy: polar bear exhausted by swimming at sea, having wandered too far from land when the ice melts, arrives back on shore and tries in his desperation to grab a walrus cub; but is fought off, wanders shakily for a while, and then lies down and dies. It's upsetting to watch something die of starvation and exhaustion like that. But don't worry! The narration tells us that the brave spirit of the father polar bear will live on in the heart of his cubs. Never mind that they've never met, and that he'd presumably have eaten them if he'd caught them when a little smaller. And here, predictably, is the major flaw of Disney's Earth. The narration is just terrible. It might have been just as bad in German, but at least we wouldn't have understood it.

There's also an issue with trying to make this epic, which is the taking of sides - something supported by the exhausting orchestral score. Early in the film we have a view of migrating caribou - oh, how beatiful, how brave! - when a wolf appears on the scene, accompanied by ominous music. After a long chase he gets our beatiful little caribou baby, though luckily the film jumps away just as the caribou gives up and sits down with a bleat - game over, no need to worry about the gore to follow. And yet, when the polar bear is trying to grab the walrus baby, whose side are we on? And what about those poor shrimp bubble-netted by the whales?

"Just as I expected, this is worse than I thought!"

No posts since December... I really am behind.

Here are the major events of the first part of this year.

In early January we bought snowshoes, and then we drove into the mountains to Golden Gate Canyon State Park only to have my car break down as we pulled into the parking lot. We had to get towed back to Denver (happily paid for by my AAA membership), where my car was pronounced dead. I spent several weeks riding the bus to work and failing to buy a new car, until I finally got one at the beginning of March through AAA's auto-buying service. It has a working radio and tape player, which feels like great luxury to me. I dug out all of those old tapes I could never bear to throw away, so I can drive to work in a cloud of nostalgia.

Somewhere in early February, at almost exactly the same time as last year and well into a horrendously busy term, my computer hard drive suddenly went the same way as my car. Had I learned my lesson and backed up recently? Well, I had at Christmas, at least.

In March we got our second cat, Palm of the Hand Kittie. She's both frenetic and friendly, and looks like Jiji in Kiki's Delivery Service.

I've been meaning for a while to write a few notes on things we've enjoyed lately. My last term was, as I suggest above, pretty hectic - I had an extra class to cover for a colleague on sabbatical, one I hadn't taught before - so I didn't have time to read or see anything much at all. Now I am being paid back, though - just one class to teach first thing in the morning, and then I can come home and do something more interesting instead. I've started reading Orhan Pamuk's "The Black Book," and am back to reading some Ishikawa Jun and trying to relaunch my research career. As to things seen: in TV I wholeheartedly recommend 30 Rock, a comedy series set in the NBC TV studios. In films, I recommend Coralline, the 3-D animation, which we went to see towards the end of last term (giving me just enough to hope to struggle through to the end...). It's by far the best thing I've seen in a long time, full of wild imaginings, magical gardens, strange circus scenes - very rewarding, even though the ending is a bit rushed and disappointing.

We've done a lot more in the way of listening. By way of brainwashing and sleep-deprivation techniques, I seem to have got J to like listening to BBC radio comedy at bedtime as much as I do. Our favorites from the last few weeks are Old Harry's Game (on both Radio 4 & 7 at the moment), and Nebulous (just finished on 7). The latter is a short two-series program that I'd listened to with half an ear in the past, but which this time round seemed hilarious. It's a sci-fi comedy set in a future time "after the Withering." The quotation heading this entry is from the last episode.