I finished reading The Pearl last night. I can understand why some people like it, but the characters all seemed undeveloped to me. It reminds me of Of Mice and Men and "Flight." It made sense as something read in high school ( Read more... )

Somehow the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies wound up in my Facebook feed. They posted a poem last week that stuck with me:

Echoes
Michael J. Wheelen (from the collection PeacekeeperThere is nothing left in this village ( Read more... )

On Saturday, I took Oscar and Max to Archaeology Day at the King Gillette Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, while Anastasia stayed home with Anne. They had a great time digging up artifacts in the sand box. Oscar got to throw a rabbit stick again and also the atlatl he was too little for the last time. They seemed to enjoy exploring afterwards ( Read more... )

Typically mornings I wake up feeling depressed, although I shake the feeling in the first hour or two.

This morning, one of my first thoughts was of someone I hadn't thought about in years: Jeremy Hebdon. I didn't know him, and don't even know what he looked like, but we were both students at the same high school when, imitating a scene in The ( Read more... )

Jon Fosse, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote an 800-page novel in one sentence.

October 4 was the Feast of St. Francis. Everyone remembers him as patron saint of animals, although he was also the first stigmatist and a great mystic. On Friday, the church had a blessing of the animals, as is traditional on his feast day. (Here in L.A. we have a big blessing of the animals held by the archbishop at the plaza around Easter, but ( Read more... )

The City Hall and administrative complex of the town I live in is a collection of impressive neo-Federalist buildings that our town is no longer worthy of. Across the street, moved to that location so an apartment block could be built on its original site, is the tiny childhood home of Glen Seabourg, the physicist who became Chancellor of Berkeley ( Read more... )

Lately I've been spending a lot of time cutting down the vines along the side fence. We planted them years ago, thinking it was a species of bougainvillea, only to find it was a creeping vine with beautiful blue trumpet flowers. I hate to spend such effort killing something because it has put forth such an effort to live, but in the intervening ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago I had a brief interaction with a Deputy Attorney General from the State Bureau of Environmental Justice. I spend my life reducing archaeological sites to words. Often, in the course of excavation, I destroy these sites, until nothing is left other than the labeled artifacts (that are sometimes then reburied), a stack of field notes ( Read more... )

Recently, academia.edu sent me emails asking me to verify I am the author of a 2004 publication in Japanese. I had assumed someone in Japan had uploaded the abstract of my Master's thesis, but I finally ran the title, "特集 拉致被害者の全員救出を急げ--特定失踪者の真相究明も課題." I finally had Google translate it, and apparently it means, "Special Feature: Hurry to rescue all ( Read more... )