Photocosm

The Greens Of Summer

 

 

This is the Berkeley Marina. That's Emeryville straight ahead. And that's a dog guarding the dock, working on its tan. It wouldn't let me visit the dock unless I applied some sunblock to its ears.

We've had a lot of sunshine lately, good for everything except maybe fine art photographs. Half of a photo is the sky, and a beautiful blue sky is boring. Fortunately, we're about to enter the fog season.  By the first week of July, big rivers of fog will blow in off the Pacific. Some places such as the Sunset district of San Francisco will go for days without seeing the sun.  They should call it the Sungone district.

 

A Lotus Elise in the morning at a motel in Marin County.

 

Emeryville is constructing a drain system that will transport water from the streets to the San Francisco Bay.  A city that truly cared about beauty would leave this beautiful abstract art installation in place, but all they care about is public safety.

 

The Baseball Car.  This VW Beetle has the look of a baseball, or a railroad with only one rail, or maybe a zipper for easy access to the car's internal parts. The license plate frame notifies us that the driver has seen a baseball game in every city with a major league team. The license plate is the seven-letter version of "WILD PITCH." Guess the owner of the Baseball Car is in town to watch our local minor league team, the "Berkeley Nobel Prizewinners." 

 

A young lady named Jeanne attempts to subdue a gaggle of balloons. She told me one balloon had already popped. Jeanne steered the balloons into her car and another one popped as I shot photographs. They don't go down without a fight.

I didn't think of it at the time, but I should have suggested returning the popped balloons to the counter and asking for an exchange. If the balloons you just bought won't make it out of the parking lot,  you know they're defective. The state of California has the toughest balloon consumer protection laws in the nation.

 

 

 

 

The Day After Bloomsday

 

I was walking home today through the wicked streets of Emeryville, and a white SUV passed me as it headed toward the infinite shores of the San Francisco Bay.  I whipped out my camera and got the best picture I could, which wasn't much.  A distant photo of a white SUV, but not a readable photo of a license plate. Fine. So, what was so important about that plate?

Yesterday was the most important date in literary history, according to a lot of experts, June 16th. They call it BLOOMSDAY.  It's the single day when the action of the James Joyce novel, Ulysses, takes place.  In poll after poll among writers and their ilk, Ulysses is regarded as the most important novel in the English language. Yesterday, Garrison Keillor gave it some attention at Writers Almanac. 

And what is my connection to Ulysses?  For starters, I own the audiobook for it, and the novel itself is on my iPod Touch. There are a couple of good Ulysses audiobooks, I have them both. I won't go into details here, but James Joyce did something amazing with his novel. You can study it for a decade or two and not learn everything he did with it. Took him seven years to write it, and the book continues to educate the educators. Right now, I'm listening to Frank Delaney's excellent podcast about Ulysses. He expects to be done in about twenty years -20- and I use his podcast to comprehend the novel.

I kept a lookout yesterday, searching for signs of Bloomsday. Never saw anything special. No license plate about James Joyce, no newspaper article about Bloomsday. Didn't meet anybody named Dedalus. The day wasn't a total waste, there was sunlight and happiness, but I felt a bit cheated by the fates.

Which brings us to this day.  I was walking home after a morning of irony and a noon of transformation. Had a nice time, and then I saw something which put me into a state of aesthetic arrest. 

It was a white SUV, this photo of it is bigger than it was, I cropped it from the original. The car passed and I grabbed for the camera. The shot I got was okay, except it didn't show the plate in detail.The license plate was JJOYCE or JOYYCE, a clear variant of the license plate JOYCE.  Very very nice. A day late but right on time, and a splendid time was had by all.