Huntington Gardens

High on my list of places to go in Los Angeles was the Huntington. When I said this, I was thinking of the Library, with its permanent exhibit, including the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Gutenberg Bible, double-elephant folio edition of Audubon’s Birds of America, and so on.   I had no idea that the Library’s dimly [...]

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Going on a bear hunt

I showed up early at Bugaboo’s house for Seder today, which meant we had time to read the books I brought for his 5th birthday.  The one about the Gruffalo was a big hit.  Shark vs. Train was an established favorite. But we had the most fun with the book version of that old camp song classic, [...]

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Watchman

Utah Day 5:  May 9 No, no – not those Watchmen – this Watchman. On the last morning of our trip, we got up early, took the shuttle into the park, had breakfast at Zion’s lodge, and went hiking on the Watchman Trail.  Described as a moderate hike in our guides, it felt easy to us, proceeding [...]

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Haida Manga

        Thanks go to Sarah for bringing me Red: A Haida Manga.     What makes Red so cool, and so Haida, is that the panel borders on each page make up a single gigantic Haida-style lineform drawing that can be seen if you buy two copies of the book, unbind it, and arrange all of the pages [...]

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Lessons learned from a first trip to Alaska

(And I would sail 500 miles, and I would sail 500 more . . .) We left Denali by train, taking a scenic railroad car with a glass top to Fairbanks, our last Alaskan stop.  It was just a place to sleep for us:  We were on an early morning flight back to Seattle and [...]

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Last Looks at Denali and the Ranger of the Lost Art

When we got back from the natural history tour, we had only a couple of hours left before the train ride to Fairbanks—and the end of our tour. I used the two hours to do two things:  (1) go to the bookstore to pick up souvenirs, and (2) take one last walk on the trails [...]

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Touring the taiga

  The Denali Natural History Tour took us through the boreal forest, or taiga – which we were told repeatedly means “land of little sticks” in Russian. White spruce dominate, and you find lots of low shrubs and berries—blueberries, crowberries, wild rose, and lowbush cranberries.  Other trees include black spruce (in areas with poorly drained soil), [...]

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+13

Thirteen years ago, I threw a shower for a brand new baby boy named Steven Avram.  There were a bunch of theater and English grad students there (including his mother), and Steven received a lot of plastic bathtub-ready baby books, which were opened amidst jokes about Baby’s First Grammatology.  This weekend I flew to Cleveland for Steven’s bar mitzvah, [...]

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Haines Library Totem

Now that I’ve found it, I’m loving the Chilkat Valley News.  C.P. didn’t mention the Library as we drove quickly through town, but check out this article about the recent unveiling of the Haines Library Totem, carved from an 800-year-old cedar tree, and featuring traditional figures such as a raven and an eagle, plus one of a woman [...]

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Juneau: After the Twisted Fish

After my rafting trip on Mendenhall Lake and River, Mom and I reconnoitered and spent the afternoon on dry land in Juneau. (Well—they tell me it was dry land.  I could feel the earth moving under my feet after so much time on the Pacific Ocean.  And it rained hard enough to soak through the [...]

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