Adam Parfrey, RIP

...a which was, at the time, a collaboration between Jodi Willie and Adam Parfrey (who founded Feral House). I was deeply saddened to hear of Adam’s passing yesterday at the age of 61. Jodi and Adam took a big chance on us as new authors when they commissioned our book back in 2006. Most publishers are unoriginal and afraid to take chances. Not Adam and Jodi. It was a great pleasure to get to know both of them and we’ll really miss Adam. Adam will be...

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The Monkey Rope

...ck you should. I just finished reading it and, next to the Bible, no other book comes close to Moby Dick’s sprawling, hallucinatory weirdness. It reads like a long prose poem, a philosophical horror novel, a meditation on our relationship with the natural world and, well, who knows what else. I’m haunted by one chapter in particular, “The Money Rope.” In this chapter Melville describes the narrator, Ishmael, tied by a line to Queequeg, who is assi...

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Warning: This Blog is Based in a Mediterranean Climate

...d Vegetable Planting Calendar and the Digitalseed Flower Planting Calendar Books: The New Western Garden Book: The Ultimate Gardening Guide (Sunset Western Garden Book) Pat Welsh’s Southern California Organic Gardening (3rd Edition): Month by Month And for those of you who live where it regularly freezes and snows, you’ll be amused to hear that in all of my years of gardening the first time that I’ve ever had plants get serious frost damage was ea...

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The Architecture of Bernard Maybeck

...sco. Poet and ornithologist Charles Keeler lived in a Maybeck home. In his book, The Simple Home (which you can read online for free) Keeler says, The home must suggest the life it is to encompass. The mere architecture and furnishings of the house do not make the man any more than do his clothes, but they certainly have an effect in modifying him. A large nature may rise above his environment and live in a dream world of his own fashioning, but m...

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The Blue Bear

...of that trip, disjointed and frozen in amber. 1) I had a Little Dot comic book (presumably purchased to keep me quiet on the trip) which just fascinated me. 2) I had to sleep on a couch under the gaze of a stuffed moose head, which was absolutely terrifying. Clutching the Little Dot book helped the terrors to some extent. 3) I remember meeting my great-grandparents at what I assume was their front door. I remember that I stood the height of my gr...

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