NV-AZ-UT

Road Trip day 2 was 400 miles of unbelievable landscapes in pretty much every color, shape, and texture you can imagine, and then some.

Photos can't begin to convey it, only in part because I was driving so couldn't take pictures most of the time. We were also moving and the 

geological layers and ruptures seemed to be slowly dancing around us. But the most basic reasons are scale, distance, horizontality...

CA-NV

Road Trip day 1: we drove over 400 miles from Del Mar, CA to Mesquite, NV. The temps outside were above 100˚F for six hours but our rental Corolla kept us cool as vast lunar landscapes rolled by to left and right, the sky an expressionless blue. We stopped at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas (50th anniversary!) for dinner, but were unable to assist Laocöon, trapped beneath the fickle false sky of America's splendid fake.

Denver-bound

Revised itinerary: CA-NV-UT-CO. Departure tomorrow morning, 9:30!

Cars cars cars

This atrium-filling swarm of tail lights, at the funky new rental car hub at San Diego Airport, reminded me of fish darting and swooping with great speed. After a trip to and from Los Angeles, I see it just as congestion, remember them stationary on the wall! Thank goodness we won't be going through any city traffic on our trip. (It's been trimmed for scheduling reasons beyond our control, but will still take us through four national parks or monuments between San Diego and Denver, starting the day after tomorrow!)

Torrey Pines State Beach

 How the cookie crumbles...

Peek-a-boo

Some San Diego views. The as yet unexciting view through the "Living Lenses" at the new Fault Line Park (as the Rose Canyon Fault moves, it will move out of alignment; but do check out the audio on the website)

Here's one of the giant fresnel lenses once used at the old lighthouse atop Point Loma, and - below - a little window opened up by waves along the rocky coast, looking north up the coastline.

Colors of TPSR

There's an amazing flower show on at the Torrey Pines Extension!

Scarlet larkspur, Weed's mariposa lily, Cleveland sage, conchalagua, skunkweed and more, all in great abundance!

Nightfall

Ship ahoy!

Happened on the photo album from my last drive across the country, fifteen years ago! The route went east to west, in my old Saturn: Princeton - Baltimore - Charlottesville - Nashville - Memphis - Tulsa - Tucumcari - Abiquiu - Las Vegas - Del Mar, with detours to Shiloh, Chaco Canyon and Monument Valley. One place I saw we saw again yesterday from the plane - Ship Rock, in the northwest corner of New Mexico!

2001

2016

Coast to coast

Spent a little over five hours today flying across the distance we'll be driving over ten days soon. Weather covered most of the first hour, and also led the pilot to divert our route a little, but the views then were spectacular... Imagining ourselves on a road in the landscapes down below (though our route will be bit farther north) was trippy!

Now imagine going the other direction, desert to mountain to plain...

Creciendes

On the way to a vigil for Orlando at Grand Army Plaza this evening.

Come fly with me

So Kailash is one of those flying mountains...! 

Katia Buffetrille, "One day the mountains will go away: Preliminary remarks on the flying mountains of Tibet," in Reflections of the Mountain: Essays on the History and Social Meaning of the Mountain Cult in Tibet and the Himalaya, ed. Anne-Marie Blondeau and Ernst Steinkellner (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1996), 77-90, 79

More love

When I heard the awful news from Orlando this morning, and after trying to parse it in words, I just held on to my love, we clung to each other, touch and presence for each other somehow allowing the horror and grief and dread to just be there, in their ungraspableness..

Then I thought of all those who, in this tragedy, had lost the person whom they could hold-and-be-held in just this way. My heart broke anew.

And then the thought of all those who, for whatever reason, think such as we don't deserve to hold-and-be-held filled me with such sorrow, and fear, and sorrow again.

Anger will come too, no doubt, as people claim the horror, revel in it, use it to foment more horrors. For now, I'm with those people who, holding vigil in front of the Stonewall Inn this evening, chanted:

more love, more love, more love.

Roadtrip!

A first stab at an itinerary for our cross-country drive starting 25 June. 

Taught a lesson

My last trip to Teachers College - a conference marking the end of the phase of the MetroCITI project which had me up there for fourteen meetings over the last twelve months. It's been a pleasure, and an education, but the discussion reminded me again that, where we are

trying to build bridges to students from underserved and marginalized communities, our community college colleagues work the bridges every day, indeed, are the bridges. 2-year public colleges are where it's at. To console myself I took pics of some of the dated art in TC's hallways.

You can see America from here

The Brooklyn Museum is open evenings on Thursdays, and for free - something they don't go out of their way to publicize. But if you go on a bright sunny June evening, you can be blinded by the shockingly white room of lost-looking neo-classical statues which leads to the new, more rich and complex, disposition of the American collection.

My pupils are dangling on my cheeks

I've never really looked into Islamic lore around Job, but found my way to some as part of a book chapter on Joban reception history I'm working on. While there's not much in the Quran, accounts of the "lives of the prophets" are full of details - some continuous with Biblical, Jewish and Christian traditions I know, some not. Here's a taste from one by Abu Ishaq Ahmad Ibn Muhammed Ibn Ibrahim Al-Thalabi (died 1036),

A graphic vision of horror! (Job's fingers are useless as he scratched at his boils until all his fingernails fell off, though he still manages to put back worms which fall out, as God gave him to them for food.) But the most painful thing, we learn from a summary of various sages' views of what precipitated Job's saying "I am afflicted with distress," among his few words in the Quran (sura 39:41), may be the "gloating of enemies."

Ara'Is Al-Majalis Fi Qisas Al-Anbiya or Lives of the Prophets:

As Recounted by Abu Ishaq Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ibrahim Al-Tha'labi,

trans. William M. Brinner (Brill, 2002), 261, 270

Travelers and travelers

So it turns out the literature on pilgrimage is vast, and fascinating. And to the delight of this theorist of religion, there are lots of juicy theoretical questions too. Is pilgrimage a transaction - I bring X to Y and get Z? Does it lead to centers or peripheries? Is it primarily an activity of lay people, coopted by religious institutions and promoted by political authorities eager for prestige and revenue? What should one make of the fact that many pilgrims in the past have been traders? More recently, can one distinguish pilgrimage from tourism? (One much-cited writer subsumes both under "voluntary travel.") Much to ponder!

Seasonal

A welcome rain kissing some of the first day lilies of summer...

Sealed

Have you seen "Song of the Sea," an animated marvel from Ireland? Do!

Back to the future

Have I ever mentioned that this wall-filling view of the Soviet War Memorial in Berlin is what greets me every time I go to my office (courtesy of the New School Art Collection)? 12 panels of mixed media by Peter Waite, it dates from before the Wende, in 1987.

Brooklyn heaven

Late afternoon light on the fountain at Grand Army Plaza,

after a long walk through the elysian fields of Prospect Park...