Spying on Sycamores

Back last spring, I watched to see the first buds on a rank of sycamore trees that march down the center of Indian Hill Boulevard. Something strange happened. About half the trees turned yellow green, then darker green, then leafed out fully, leaving the other half still looking lifeless. I noticed that the leafed out group had gray, rough bark on their trunks while those still quiescent had white trunks, lightly mottled with gray and green blotches. A week went by, then the second crop of trees began to green and they fully leafed out too. At first, I conjectured that the sycamores were all the same type and there had been some kind of "beautifying" attempt to remove the gray bark from the white ones, making them slow to lift nutrients to their branches. But the seasons have turned, and I've looked at the trees every morning when I drive to work for three fourths of the year, and their trunks haven't changed. Now, I'm waiting to see if the two groups will lose their leaves at different times. Sycamore is stingy with its leaves. They turn a browny-yellow and hang on a long time. I remember, though, that last spring not a one had any leaves, so they'll go some time. A Santa Ana wind will come along to encourage them. Will they all go together when they go? I'm watching.

Fall Is Finally Here

We used to get fall around Halloween, but that didn't happen this year. It's fall now in Claremont. The big elms along the street in front of Memorial Park shed yellow leaves the size of lemons, and they swirl lazily in the air as they fall on passing cars. The tulip trees had a few yellow leaves near the trunks last week, but this week all but a few leaves have turned yellow. The sweet gums, or liquidambers, turn red, orange, or yellow at what seems random. In my front yard, one is green but for one branch of yellow leaves, and the other was dark red but has lost almost all its leaves. The gum balls on its nearly bare branches dot the sky. These two are as close to being in the same environment as possible, but act quite differently every fall. There are lots of eucalyptus trees, still green and always will be. But I try not to drive under them now, because in the driest part of the year, they might drop a branch and clobber me. The wood is terribly dense and the tree has evolved this mechanism to get rid of some of its substance when water is very limited. Too bad for any person passing beneath.

News from China via Neilson

Yesterday's NYT contained a magazine-format China Olympics feature. Far more engaging than the pedestrian articles it contained was a series of 'pop quizzes' from Neilson on issues like what kind of ice cream do American's prefer? One eye-opening pop quiz asked for the country in the world with the most cell phones. It was China (suprise!). It made me wonder how well controlled the site-exploration for cell phones is. I found out myself that there is a 30 second tape delay on network news. When I was in China, one of the news shows in English I watched covered a Tibet demonstration (I found this out when I returned to the USA). In my hotel, what I saw was this: newscaster sitting in front of a map of Tibet, says, "Today in Lhasa...", then the screen goes totally blank for 2 minutes. When he resumed, there was no announcement. So TV is under tight wraps. The news has been full of the censorship of the journalists' internet connections at the Olympics newscenter and the hotels. But phones? Maybe they offer a loop hole, who knows?

The Enigma of "The Starry Night"

Van Gogh painted one of his most famous paintings, “The Starry Night,” just over a year before he died. He was interested in night long before that, though. The curator of a current show of his work has found that he hand-copied pages of night descriptions, both scientific and poetic, into his journals. In novels, he often sought out passages concerned with the night for special notes. He wrote to friends such as Gauguin and Bernard about his ideas about night, and sketched drawings on his letters. Curator Pissarro found he also owned books concentrating on the theme of night, like “What the moon saw” by Hans Christian Anderson. It’s interesting to me that this curator found the night-theme in Van Gogh’s work so many years after his death, when no one else had particularly noticed it. What might we be focusing on that no one would note until long afterward?

Hawk and Cat

Yesterday, I was looking out my back window and heard a rush of wings. Next, a cat, nicely striped with a white bib of fur, jumped six feet straight up, grabbed the top of the wooden fence, and clambered onto it. Then, the hawk stooped on the cat but didn’t quite get his talons into her fur. She skittered along the top of the fence under some hanging fronds of wisteria, ducking her attacker. The hawk was not ready to give up, though. With another audible wing beat, the hawk swooped again, brushing aside wisteria, but missing the cat a second time. The cat had jumped down on the other side of the fence. On the way dodging the hawk, the cat paused to give me what sure looked like a conspiratorial grin. I am perfectly well aware that ethologists caution us against anthropomorphizing animals so I shouldn’t say she gave me a “conspiratorial grin.” Sorry, that’s what it looked like. Why else would she pause to look my way when a hawk was swooping over her? I can’t think of another excuse for it.

Wisdom from Jennifer Lynch and Mary Oliver

A new movie directed by Jennifer Lynch, “Surveillance,” is coming out this week. Her last film was, as they say, “a disappointment.” It was released when she was 24; now she’s 40. In an interview by Dennis Lim in the LAT on May 22, she said, “If there’s one gift I’ve been given from both my parents…it’s the idea that you make the work you want to make—the joy is in the making. Once it’s done, you let it go, and you move on.” I like the idea of the joy in the making process; it’s similar to writing where the vision and the attempt to capture it in words, either on the first try or through re-visioning it, is where the joy lies. The submission/rejection dance is the diffucult part. For the joyful experiences to continue, getting the writing published is important. I read Red Bird, a book of poetry by Mary Oliver, over the weekend. I’m not sure she struggles any longer to get her work published, now that she’s a well known poet. But if she does, I am profoundly thankful that she persists. Such a connection to natural beauty threatened, to the wisdom of nature, to people’s halting efforts to find joy in each other, is (as Master Card would say) priceless.

Following the Wandering Virginia Woolf

I just reread “A Room of One’s Own” and marveled anew at the way it feels. I have a friend whose brilliant mind skips and skitters about just like Woolf depicts here, captures for us to admire. I never know where our conversations will jump to next, and that’s what reading this essay is like. But of course, having read it before, I never had that impatience that I sometimes get with my friend, imagining there isn’t really a destination. For both Woolf and my friend, there is. The tour around Robin Hood’s barn is the best route there. You accumulate the same moss on the initial ideas that the author/friend has accumulated, and rejoice with her at your joint arrival at the final destination. You carry along the same rejection at the Bodleian Library, the same admiration of threepenny press writers who put food on their tables when women were just beginning to write for money. As a scientist, I have a problem with discursive approaches to meaning. All of my training insists that the simplest path is the most elegant, the most desirable. But now that I’m getting to the age of sage-ing, I can admit it. The wandering way can be even better.