Sarah Wrote That

SW to NE, from the DuBois Library 23rd floor this morning. The gap in the middle is due west, where someone—the nerve!—was using a study carrel.

climateadaptation:

100% accurate! I live in that pink area for “Hippies” and was born in “Republicans.”

citymister:

Accurate to an extent

I’d add a small but loud maroon dot in the east part of “Hippies”: UMASS BROS

Reblogged from Climate Adaptation

November light, storm damage.

Dickinson Street, Amherst

Day four without heat or electricity. It’s so cold in my house that milk stored on the kitchen counter hasn’t soured. At least restaurants are open, and coffee shops, so I can work (walking home after dark I cross from the street-lit to the dark zone). I’m telling myself it’s like camping… except with teaching and sitting in meetings with people who are not camping.

Great Invisible Crashing

…coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

The branches started falling, really falling, Saturday night after the height of the storm had passed, in windless silence, the streets not yet plowed, the undergraduates not yet marveling up and down the length of the town. I read about what was impending on Facebook first, from a friend in Belchertown (laugh if you will, non-Western Mass folks, but only if you’ve got a better pub than this), and even as I read, I heard percussive snapping cracks and dull thuds resounding up both ends of the street toward the town center and into the wooded neighborhoods behind me. One branch, 20 feet long, crashed at my door and blocked me in until morning.

The electricity, Titanic-like, stayed on long after it was certain to go out, not because of the earliness of the storm or its intensity, but its earliness and intensity following an autumn that never happened. Most of our trees were still in summer leaf. Leaning out my window I saw, in the streetlights reflected from the snow, wires bowed, holes in tree canopies where single branches had gone, and in the next block, an entire row down. Around the corner a transformer was flaring blue and wild, and in sync with it, slightly delayed, our lights faltered, and finally went out.

The one advantage of snow-induced power outages: at least they come with an enormous nearby freezer. I nestled coolers and shopping bags in the uncleared snow, filled sinks and buckets with water, gathered flashlights. Strangely, I had no candles in the house, but AAA battery pen lights turned out to be enough for grading papers and reading.

Now we wait, calibrate what is doable, prudent, or necessary. Tinned fish, crackers, bread. One adapts quickly, doesn’t expend energy even thinking about what’s not possible, what makes no sense to purchase at the cash-only reopening stores. No cereal because dubious milk after two days, even after being kept outside; no rice or pasta because no stove. Apples. Power is back spottily; going back to my own, unheated, un-Internet-ed, cold water house is going back a hundred years and more, except they would have had a coal shed or woodpile then, and at least one room with heat, though an icy walk to an outhouse. The town smells of woodsmoke, and I’m reminded of the nineteenth century’s denuded hills, spatters of coal smoke inking long-defunct rail routes along rivers; the pre-refrigeration-era knowledge my grandmothers were taught. not all of it so wise (the jar of bacon fat perennially refreshed, within easy reach at the back of the stove when you wanted it). One bakery in town has hot coffee, at least.

The first thing when the power comes back is take a hot shower, then make hot coffee (I tried making it with cold water in my one-cup; terrible). And in five days, a week, I am sure I will not stop to think except idly and in passing, in a way that itself feels a luxury, how most of history would regard not only as luxuries but as marvels the things we call utilities and basics, whose cost I measure against paychecks that I do not touch but view as digital records that exist as code on a cloud server transmitted in encrypted packets on fiber optic cables.

Last night I saw the stars brighter than I have seen them since moving here.

Remember the end of Star Trek III when the seasons all go haywire before the planet blows up?

Today is the kind of weather one moves to New England for, a big, blowy sky, cool, air that feels good going down.

Beyond UMass’s entrance is the Fine Arts Center (shown this week in Architizer’s Kevin Roche retrospective). Outbound past the university farm, I flushed a great blue heron from a reedy pasture corner. The llama herd (middle) was mildly curious, then decided that, as usual, grass was more interesting. On the hill beyond them, hidden except for the high rise dorms of Southwest, is most of Amherst.

ewilcox:

This is the Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, where I spent a gorgeous fall Saturday this weekend at their annual graduate conference. I’d forgotten how much I like Northeast autumns. It’s easy to forget things like that in Los Angeles. The leaves actually change colors, you guys! When you come inside after walking around outside, your nose and cheeks are flushed and cold to the touch! Drinking hot pumpkin spice lattes actually MAKES SENSE (as opposed to attempting to drink them to get in the “fall spirit” when it’s 90 degrees outside).

The conference was great—intimate, unlike so many graduate conferences. Held in the house. Almost everyone listened to all the papers presented. I’d run off copies of a handout for my presentation, but somehow forgot to actually print off the damn paper itself, so I ended up reading from my laptop—but no one cared, and a few people even liked it, I think! Sometimes academic work can feel really lonely, and sometimes I even forget why I’m pursuing certain avenues of thought, or why I thought I wanted to read certain books. But hearing people like me present their thoughts about a wide range of Early Modern topics—not just Shakespeare and Milton, but Kyd and Heywood and some guy named Clement Ellis and Renaissance armor—reminded me why I care about this stuff. I even came away excited to read some new things.

And! Afterwards I met up with Sarah Malone, who is just as awesome and nice and interesting in person as she is on Tumblr. Real-life Tumblr people! They exist!

As is Elizabeth! So much fun! I’m so glad she got the first day that felt like proper New England fall.

The Renaissance Center is one of my favorite spots on the UMass campus. We’ve been lucky to have our start/end of the year festivities here the last few years, looking out over the fields and the valley as dogs run by with their joggers.

(Source: ecantwell)

Reblogged from Line Breaks & Other Violent Crimes

I mis-remembered the distance of the route I chose to run today, and ended up doing 12 miles thinking I was doing 8 to 9. I feel like I’ve been wrung out, slowly; but what a day for a mistake. With apologies to John Cheever:

It was one of those autumn Sundays when everyone sits around saying, “I drank too much last night.” You might have heard it whispered by the pledges leaving Sigma Tau, heard it from the lips of the parents, struggling with their Dockers at the University Motor Lodge, heard it from the sweatshirt racks and the incense tables on Pleasant Street where the steel drum player was suffering from a terrible hangover. “Bro, I drank too much,” said Braydon Ellis. “We all drank too much,” said Madison Burrell. “It must have been the PBR,” said Cheryl Emmenthal. “I drank too much of that pumpkin ale.”

This was at the sidewalk tables of Amherst Coffee. The coffee, served in brown mugs the size of small bowls, was foamed in the shape of leaves. It was a fine day. In the west there was a low scud of hurrying cloud so like a town seen from a distance—from a car stuck in traffic on the Massachusetts Turnpike—that it might have had a name. Shaftsbury. Marion. Lowell. The sun was hot. Tara Aperstazy sat by the coffee mugs, one hand on one, one around a glass of Shiraz. She was a slender woman—she seemed to have the especial slenderness of youth—and while she was far from young, she had dressed in capris that morning and given her own backside a smack, as she jogged toward the scent of coffee in her dining room. She might have been compared to an autumn day, particularly the first hours of one, and while she lacked a tennis racket or a yoga mat, the impression was definitely one of youth, sport, and clement weather. She had been walking and now she was breathing deeply, stertorously as if she could gulp into her lungs the components of that moment, the heat of the sun, the intenseness of her pleasure. It all seemed to flow into her chest. Her own house stood in Northampton, eight miles to the west, where her three plaid-shirted roommates would just be waking up and might be considering making a seasonal quiche. Then it occurred to her that by taking a dogleg to the southwest she could reach her home on foot.

October 15: 2010 & 2011

Two years, of course, does not a trend make. But it seems to me that in more of the past few years than not, foliage has been duller and later to change than it was the year before. In 2010, though the colors changed later than in 2009, when they did they were full and brilliant. This year, with colder weather finally sweeping in on days of windy rain, many trees have gone directly from green to bare, while others are barely past summer.