The Black Isle

Madam Chiang Kai-Shek performs at the Hollywood Bowl, 1943. Images from the wonderful Online Archive of California. (UCLA Special Collections)

The archive also holds over 20,000 items in its Dorothea Lange collection, 1919-1965.

I know. I need a better camera. But for now:

I cannot vouch for The Tickled Trout “English pub” but the hotel was OK-nasty in typical Ramada Inn fashion. Upside: it’s got no pool and therefore does not attract noisy-family types and is just two minutes from picturesque tourist trap Old Town San Diego. Old Town is home, however, to el Agave, very possibly the most ambitious, if not the best, Mexican restaurant in California. I had many, many empanadas followed by fresh baby squids cooked with a flamboyant pasilla sauce. The restaurant doubles as a tequila museum, with 850 bottles of it displayed around the room. (I don’t photograph my food — I think it’s gauche and pity those who do.)

disturbing sign

not-so-baby panda

active mama panda

a religious hush

camels (Central Asian variety has two humps, unlike the one-humped Middle Eastern variety)

warty hog

sign on sidewalk in Old Town San Diego, by the oldest cemetery.

Mission San Juan Capistrano on gorgeous day (this afternoon)

Mission San Juan Capistrano, part of the original church that was destroyed by an earthquake in 1812

Off to the zoo. Back Thursday, with pics.

Ideally, this is what it should feel like once I’m done writing, but…

Done with the final drafting, now for the read-through. My book feels like the person in the center of the picture right now. It’s all blood and bone, blood and bone…

My favorite passage from Hilary Mantel’s The Giant, O’Brien, about the crossed paths of a storytelling giant and an anatomist who collects unusual corpses in 18th century London:

The hooks, the crowbars, are to insert under the coffin lid. The earth at the foot acts as a counterweight, so — breath indrawn, and held — the lid snaps across. With experience, it is possible to predict — with a thrill that runs from the palms to the elbows — the very second when the wood will crack.

The corpse then is roped beneath the arms, and hauled out, head first, like a difficult birth. Flapped on to dry land, it is straightened and stripped. The graveclothes are thrown back. The gaping sacks are drawn over the flesh, the knees pulled up, the head forced down, the whole returned — as if after birth comes conception — to that economical package in which we spend our nine months in the womb. And lashed with cords. A compact bundle: looking no bigger than a dog, or a few pounds of jostling turnips.

Wonderful Stuart Staples/Tindersticks video from his “Leaving Songs” album:

crab
crab
crabbity crab

50 pages to go to the end of this draft.

Reviewed in the Book Review today. Out in paper in the UK for £6.59 (Amazon.co.uk) on March 1.

From the NYT:
With “Paris: The Secret History,” Andrew Hussey shows that it was ever thus, as he sifts through two millenniums of history to expose the dark side of the City of Light. Addictively readable and richly detailed, the book recounts “the story of Paris from the point of view of … marginal and subversive elements in the city,” those “insurrectionists, vagabonds, immigrants, sexual outsiders, criminals … whose experiences contradict and oppose official history.” For Hussey, a biographer of the Situationist thinker Guy Debord, these elements make up an essential part of the Parisian landscape. Following the poet Jean de Boschère, he emphasizes the “endless play of polarities — shadow and light, past and present” — that give the city not just its charm, but its edge.

Yet another new distraction!