LA Shots

Here are some photos from the last few days.


Bright Santa Monica house, not quite finished.

Italian Stone Pine Bark

 

OK, I get the Karma/Carma pun, but it wouldn't seem that Chevron (I guess their branding works, or is it someone else?) would pay to remind us we're all going to get screwed for polluting the earth with our cars. 

At Hurry Curry - Venice and Beethoven.  Delicious and ridiculously cheap.

 

After those rainy first days here.  

And today it was pushing hot.

Car or mobile storage bin?

 

There was a small arts and crafts fair at Moorpark and Laurel Canyon near where we were visiting.  I was impressed with the quality of the work.  Young people, but also retired folks.  One guy was a National Geographic photographer.  This guy was a pathologist and does really interesting work with paints and collages.  While we were talking, there was a loud crunching sound.

Ah, California.  Who says you can't meet others while driving?   We met Deano. Not driving.  I was admiring his neat shadow boxes with my camera and he didn't like that.  But I apologized and we had a good talk.  He's got a blue thumbnail.  I have pictures but he made it clear posting them would not be appreciated.  So go to his website. 

Another hospital visit.  (My mom's doing fine, this is someone else.)

And the ride home on the freeway.  Don't worry, we were going less than 10/mph at this point.  Six lanes southbound.  I'm no longer used to driving 60 mph with so many cars all around me making sudden moves.  At night.  So crawling along was fine. 

Damn This World Is Complicated Part III: Kelp Flies and Gulls [UPDATED]

 [UPDATE Aug 9, 2021: See this LA Times section on Recovering California Beach Dunes.]

So, we have the endangered Pacific Snowy Plovers (Part I) that live above the wrack line feeding on beach hoppers (Part II) and kelp flies that live in the kelp on the wrack line.  This is a whole world that most people miss completely.  The snowy plovers camouflage nicely on the sand, so nicely, that when they freeze thinking they can't be seen, they are right.  And people going to enjoy the beach can step on them.

People generally see the kelp as smelly garbage left by the surf.  And if they get closer, they see bugs and keep their distance.  But this is all a neat ecosystem and if you look closely at the 'bugs' there are a number of different kind.  And biologists have discovered the lives are pretty complex.

And we learned that humans' love for the beach has caused snowy plovers to find other places to lay their eggs - like the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

So Part III doesn't have that much to add, but here we'll look at the kelp flies that are also part of the plover diet. 

From a Hopkins Marine Science student paper by Joel D. Hyatt in 1972

The beach wrack flies Fucellia rufitibia, Coelopa vanduzeei, and Leptocera johnsoni occupy successive vertical levels inside banks of mixed wrack found low on California beaches. When the wrack is washed away, Coelopa are then found at the sand-wrack flake interface with Leptocera; Fucellia in a black band of flies above the highest waterline. Fucellia range widely up and down the beach. Movement to higher beach positions at night seems to be associated with temperature, but some Fucellia remain in the warmer surface layers of the lower wrack banks at night. Coelopa are usually only found at lower beach positions where they inhabit the moist intertior of wrack banks. Moisture and tide level are the important factors in Coelopa behavior. Mark and release experiments show that F. rufitibia do not disperse widely but constitute more or less fixed communities on the beach. C. vanduzeei are gregarious. In wrack preference experiments in the field, Fucellia and Coelopa exhibit strong preference for the surf grass Phykllospadix, probably as a source of shelter. Brown algae and mixed wrack are preferred to the same degree; red algae very little.

So, now there are three different kinds of kelp fly.  See, it always gets more complicated.  But that's true about learning anything.  Some people recognize classical music as "boring."  Others recognize it as "classical."  Some can recognize the period it was composed, and others the composers.  And some the specific title of the piece.

The same with rock music, or birds.  And now we're looking at kelp flies.   So are the ones I caught in the camera 

• Coelopa vanduzeei  
• Fucellia rufitibia or
  
• Leptocera Johnsoni?

What do these names mean and where do they come from?

If the spelling of genus and species terms sounds like Greek to you . . . then you’re on track in many cases. Every species can be unambiguously identified with just two words. The genus name and species name may come from any source whatsoever. Often they are Latin words, but they may also come from Ancient Greek, from a place, from a person, a name from a local language, etc. In fact, taxonomists come up with specific descriptors from a variety of sources, including inside-jokes and puns.

Scientific names sometimes bear the names of people who were instrumental in discovering or describing the species. Finally, some scientific names often reflect the common names given by people living in the region.  (from a Texas AMU website)

I found this on an Audubon Magazine website:

". . . the Coelopidae, a family of flies found on seaweed-strewn coasts around the world. Larvae develop in piles of rotting seaweed, or wrack.”

What is vanduzeei?  I'm not sure.  I remember talking to my friend about names for monitor lizards and sometimes they would Latinize the discoverer's name.  I did find this reference:

New synonyms are indicated under Squamodera vanduzeei (Van Dyke) as follows: S. fisheri (Cazier), S. fisheri vermiculata (Knull), and S. nanbrownae (Figg-Hoblyn).

It's possible that vanduzeei is taken from Van Dyke.   I don't think it really matters.  What I'm trying to show here is that everything, absolutely everything, has a surface, and as you look under the surface, there's another and another.  So many things to know.

And my point in the first of this series of posts was that in something like the ecology of the snowy plover, which is relatively tangible and finite, it is easy to see this complication and dive into it.

As we do that, we can recognize that this same level of complication lies in all the issues we face in life - from how what we eat affects our health to the effects of plastic bottles on the environment.  And while it is complicated, it isn't that difficult to go beyond the simplistic synopses given by mass media and politicians, at least to the point of having a reasonable feel for the issue.

 So, which of the the three kelp flies is my picture?


Livingworldphotography has a photo of Coelopa vanduzeei and says their hairy legs are a way to identify them.  Mine doesn't have hairy legs.


Natihistoc.bio  has a note with his excellent picture of Fucillia Rufitibia:

Note reddish tibia after which the species is named

And mine isn't reddish. 

And I couldn't find any pictures of Leptocera johnsoni.  And if you are asking, if these are all kelp flies, why don't they have the same genus name, then you are asking the right sort of questions.  I don't know the answer and I've got lots to do.

But along with the kelp, the wrack line, the snowy plovers, and the kelp flies, there were also lots of gulls on the beach.  Gulls are another very familiar part of the landscape that most people can identify as gulls.  But beyond that, it gets hairy.  For adults, it's relatively easy.  The color of their beaks and feet get you a long way.  But gulls are complicated because they look different at each stage of their lives and the bird books show three to five different stages for each type of gull. Just pointing out more complication that I won't go into now.  In any case, here are some gulls that were also out on the beach where the plovers were. 

The Santa Cruz Bird Club has some useful flow charts for identifying gulls.

This is a Heerman Gull at a easy to recognize stage

If anyone is still with me, this isn't to make people give up because everything is so complicated.

Step 1 is to recognize one's ignorance.  There is so much to know, we can only know a little bit of it.

Step 2 is to realize that we can gain some expertise in different areas without all that much work.  We just have to focus and drill down a bit.  Ideally, finding a book which does a good job of giving an overview of the topic, the different main lines of thought, and the key vocabulary.

Step 3 is to stop being caught up by all the trash information out there in the world - junk tv shows, junk news, etc.  Like junk food, it takes the place of serious information and makes our brains fat and lazy with useless data.

Damn This World Is Complicated Part II: Beach Hoppers [UPDATED]

 [UPDATE Aug 9, 2021: See this LA Times section on Recovering California Beach Dunes.]

OK, this one won't be as involved as the last one [Part I: Snowy Plovers.]   But remember, this is one of the main food sources of the threatened Western Snowy Plover, so it extends the discussion.  Our guide yesterday pointed out the beach Hoppers.  I grew up on nearby beaches and so I saw these as a kid, but I never knew their name and never looked at them carefully.  Beach Hoppers are small and much easier for me to capture in my camera so my pictures here will make up for the lack of photos of the Snowy Plover.   In fact, the digital camera makes it relatively easy to see them larger than you can with the naked eye.

So, let's get started with Beach Hoppers.

The Monterrey Aquarium website has a set of cards for kids that you can print out and learn about the beach life.  Here's their beach hopper card.

For more detailed pictures of a beach hopper labeled Orchestoidea californiana see Peter J. Bryant's website.

A 1964 Ecology article by Darl E. Bowers discusses two species of Orchestoidea - O. californiana and O. corniculata.  I'm guessing mine are californiana, but I'm not sure.  Bowers writes, in part:

"Competition for burrows between hoppers of the same species is commonly observed. In the early morning hours, large males may be seen fighting for possession of holes left open the night before. Fighting is presumably less energy-consuming than digging a burrow, but since most pugnacity is shown by mature males, possession of a burrow already occupied by a female is also of prime importance. Skirmishes for food items are likewise to be seen. Beach hoppers are eaten by an array of avian predators, mostly diurnal birds, and there is evidence that raccoons, moles, humans, beetles, and other animals take a toll of the hopper populations."

See?  As I said in the previous post, the more we know, the more we realize how much we don't know.  I was only vaguely aware of these critters before yesterday's beach walk and now I know quite a bit.

And it's a helpful reminder that we ought to dig a little deeper into all the important issues of the day.  They are more complex than we think, but a little research on the internet, finding a good book that gives an overview of the issues can help us quite a bit. 

Check the guys peeking from below

Marinebio.net has great pictures of beach hoppers and other animals living on the beach including kelp flies that will be in the next post.


There we learn:

Beach hoppers burrow under seaweed to escape the dryness and heat of the day. They prefer the damp sand under the piles of rotting seaweed. This picture shows what you might see if you pulled up a pile of rotting seaweed ... the beach hoppers will jump (hop) this way and that. It is very easy to identify a beach hopper because it is the only species on the beach that will hop. At night many of the beach hoppers are out of the sand and hopping around the beaches in search of food.

Hopping and digging in the sand require specialized legs as seen in these views [You have to go to marinebio.net to see their great shots] of the beach hopper's segmented body. The hoppers dig head first, inserting their antennae in the sand (left). As they dig their abdomen is the last part seen (right) before the hopper plugs up its hole. Beach hoppers are in the crustacean group whose members are called amphipods. The beach hoppers found on the sandy beaches of Santa Barbara belong to the genus Orchestia or Orchestoidea. Beach hoppers are sometimes called 'sand fleas' but they are not fleas (nor are they even insects) and are not able to bite humans.

Hey, don't get squeamish here.  These are like tiny, shell-less shrimp.  And without the kelp washing up on the beach for these critters to hide and feed in, the snowy plover would have to change how it eats. 

Beach Hoppers is also the name of a musical group, a bicycle, and a boat.

[Update:   Part III:  Kelp Flies]
[Update June 5, 2017:  This post about a study of micro plastics in the environment. The researchers fed beach hoppers micro plastics to see how they affected the food chain.  I found out about this because someone got to this post from a link there.]

Damn This World Is Complicated Part I: Snowy Plovers and the Wrack [Updated]

 [UPDATED Aug 9, 2021: See this LA Times section on Recovering California Beach Dunes.]

The world continues to amaze me and to remind me how little I know.  We went for a walk at Dockweiler Beach yesterday, coordinated by the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors and the LA Audubon Society,  to see Snowy Plovers.  We did see them, but they were too far away and moved too much to get any good pictures.  That's one in the poster to the right. (I made this one bigger so you can double click to enlarge it.) But in addition to the Snowy Plovers we found out about other critters the plovers depend on. 

I'm sure this post goes into far more detail than any of you intended to read.  But I think if you bear with me, you'll see my point.  The more you know about something, the less you know.  I experience that a lot.

So, even though you know more than you did, you realize you know less because the universe of what there is to know has grown faster than the universe of what you know.  And it's even worse for people who know things that are patently wrong. 

I think this is something we should all keep in mind as we try to understand the diverse issues in our life - what causes the common cold, whether the bailout helped and what would have happened without it, the degree to which global warming is caused by humans and whether it can be changed.

It seems that many people want these issues simplified into whether they "support my ideology or not."  It's important to let go of our ideologies and be willing to accept the uncertainty that the complication of the world requires.  Be willing to accept findings that contradict what we want to be true.

Looking just at the ecology of the threatened Snowy Plover - a relatively simple and concrete phenomenon - reminds us of the incredible complexity of the issues our media and politicians manage to boil down into sound bytes.

The Snowy Plover


I took no pictures of the birds.  There were only about 20 birds on the stretch of beach we were at.  But considering the following from Coal Oil Point Reserve, that's a lot.

"The Pacific Coast population of the Western Snowy Plover was listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act in 1993 because of declining populations. The stretch of beach between Isla Vista and Ellwood (including Sands Beach) was designated "Critical Habitat" in December of 1999; at the time of the critical habitat designaton, the population in the entire Pacific Coast of the United States was estimated at less than 1500 individuals. "

The quote above is from a stretch of beach near Santa Barbara.  We were about 120 miles south at the west end of the Los Angeles International airport. 

Our guide at the wrack line

Things get complicated here because the snowy plover lives on the dry part of the beach and eats insects that live in the kelp that is washed on the shore.  One of the words I learned yesterday was "the wrack line."  This is not a place to torture birds.  Rather it is the edge of high tide where the seaweed and other debris sits on the beach after high tide.


 The best short description of the wrack line I found was an infrequently updated blog called The Wrackline:

The wrack line is the area of the shore between the low and high tides. The flotsam and jetsam of the sea come to rest along the wrack line. Who doesn't like to wander along that zone just for the discovery? Wander the wrack line of the modern world and see what washes up.

Local wrack line full of trash

Barbara Hurd wrote a book called Walking the Wrack Line and below you can hear her read on NPR a brief section about driftwood on some Alaskan beach.  

AA

Kelp pile

See what I mean about complications? I grew up at the beach and I'd never heard of the wrack line, but it plays an important part in the life of the snowy plover. This plover lives on the critters that live on the kelp on the wrack line. They nest further up on the dry sand of the beach.

And that's why they are so threatened on the Pacific Coast. People like beaches and coastal habitat has been degraded by humans.  From a report by Westminster College (Salt Lake City) ecology student Egan A. Rowe:

On U.S. coasts this habitat degradation is caused primarily by expanding beach front development. Recreation has also been responsible for a significant decline in the size of breeding populations. The use of beach grass (Ammophila arenaria) to stabilize dunes along the Pacific Coast has also greatly affected these birds. This stabilization has reduced the extent of open nesting habitat. Other impacts include frequent mechanical raking of beaches to remove garbage, seaweed, and other debris which has made beaches in southern California unsuitable for nesting and harms food resources for the snowy plover. These and other human pressures have caused this species to migrate inland to available breeding habitats such as the Great Salt Lake playa margins.

Rowe tells us further:

[T]he population breeding along the Pacific Coast of the U.S. and Baja California is listed by U.S. Fish and Wildlife as a Threatened species. In Washington and Alabama it has been designated an Endangered species by those states.  These designations have given rise to many measures being taken to protect this animal's habitat.  Some states have posted informative signs and roped of areas to reduce disturbance of nesting birds.  In some states such as Oregon, beaches have been closed.  These and other techniques have lead to improved hatching success.  However, there is still research being done to improve snowy plover nesting and hatching success.  For instance, experiments with solar powered electric fences, chick shelters, and artificially elevated nesting substrates at the Great Salt Plain, Oklahoma, show promise for increasing reproductive success.  All measures to protect snowy plovers have been too recent to determine their effect on population size.  [This and the other reports on different parts of the Great Salt Lake ecosystem appear to be from 1999.

What's happening eleven years later?  Well, ten years later, this report from the Daily Sound about snowy plovers at a beach in Goleta near Santa Barbara suggests real conflicts of will:

The drama over the plover stretches back more than three years. As part of a complex land swap agreement to preserve Ellwood Mesa from development, the California Coastal Commission granted a coastal development permit in 2005, that required Goleta to take steps to protect the plover habitat. The plover is listed as threatened with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

 Among the requirements were for city to prohibit dogs and horses in some key areas and install permanent signage.

 Singer said that Goleta has taken some steps to protect the plovers, but high costs, opposition from dog owners, and questions about whether plover nesting actually exists along the roughly two-mile stretch of beach within Goleta’s jurisdiction, have slowed the city down.

“We don’t have snowy plovers nesting on our beaches,” he said. “Nesting doesn’t currently exist. Maybe that’s because we have dogs running around. I don’t  know. We don’t exactly have perfect conditions.”

 But the lack of an official habitat management plan is why activists suspect that plovers aren’t obviously nesting in the area. They point to the success of UCSB’s Coal Oil Point Reserve nearby as testimony that a program can work.
 At Coal Oil Point, docents monitor the plover habitat area year-round and the program has become a statewide model for plover preservation and habitat restoration.

Coal Oil Point Reserve was the place in the first quote of this post. 

The walk we went on yesterday is part of the conservation efforts - this being educational part of the efforts- of the Los Angeles Audubon Society  and the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors.

An LA Times article tells more about these efforts:

The birds are federally listed as a threatened species, which means they are at risk of becoming endangered.

The enclosure just north of Imperial Highway is the result of a three-year effort by federal and county officials and the Los Angeles Audubon Society. The Fish and Wildlife Service is committed to spending up to $14,000 on the project, officials said. Passersby may now spot an orange mesh fence surrounding the enclosure, with one side open to the ocean. What they may not see, however, are the Western snowy plovers.

"You can look right at them and think you're looking at sand," said David De Lange, president of the Los Angeles Audubon Society, an experienced bird watcher.

Plovers nest in the dunes by scratching an indentation in the sand, sometimes under a piece of debris, and lay their sand-colored eggs inside. But the camouflage may also make them vulnerable to unwary foot traffic.

"The chicks look like little cotton balls on sticks. They are cute," Hendron said. "But it's very easy to miss them, and if people even let their dogs off the leash, the dogs can step on the eggs. They can kill a chick."

That could be one reason the birds do not feel safe enough to nest at the Dockweiler site. The plovers will roost or hang out, but once the instinct to lay eggs kicks in, they tend to leave for safer areas, bird watchers say.

This has become a problem across Los Angeles County, De Lange said, noting that there has not been a confirmed Western snowy plover nesting on a county beach since 1949. Scientists hope that fencing off the area will discourage people from disturbing the birds, allowing them to relax enough to build nests. Experts have tried this approach at other sites in California, including Huntington Beach, with positive results, Hendron said. .  .

Figures show local conservation efforts may be working. The U.S. population of the species in 1993, when it was first listed as threatened, numbered fewer than 1,400. By 2005, the official head count had grown to 2,300.

I told you this would get complicated and offer my admiration to those of you who made it this far.  I want to do one or two more posts covering beach jumpers and kelp flies that live in the kelp on the wrack line and are major dining delicacies of the snowy plover.  And I also have pictures of the trash that came to rest on the wrack line.

But the point of all this is not simply that snowy plovers are threatened and minor human adjustments seem like they could help a lot.  Though that is important.  The point of this and the following posts on the topic is to remind people that this tiny little issue is vastly complicated so that we all remember the other issues our states and countries are facing are also that complicated and more so.

But just as I have gained a huge amount of knowledge in two days about this (and a growing awareness of how much else there is to know) I think the other issues we face are not impossible to grasp - at least at the level necessary to make reasonable decisions to resolve them.

We do have to stop spending our time on trivia and a little more time on getting more depth than the media offer us on Iran, immigration, the backgrounds of political candidates, etc.

And we have to drop our ideological "us" v. "them" mentality and work together to make this a better world for humans and all the other living things we share it with.

[UPDATE:  Part II: Beach Hoppers, Part III:  Kelp Flies] 

Cliff Groh Has Lengthy Background Post on Nicholas Marsh

There was an internet problem here at my mom's last night through this morning and the sun is shining beautifully so I had to go run and I do have to talk to and do things with and for my mom while I'm here, so this is just a quick link to Cliff's post at the blog Alaska Political Corruption which fills in a lot more details on Nick Marsh based on various reports he gathered.

Here's the link:

Notes on the Life, Death, and Mental State of Nicholas Marsh

(Marsh is the young federal prosecutor in the Alaska corruption cases who committed suicide last week.)

Salmon No Brainer

My mom wanted us to pick up some stuff from Costco near Marina Del Rey on the way back from our bird watching outing (more on that later). I saw the Alaska salmon and then I saw the Atlantic farmed salmon.

When the quality is better and the price is lower, does the shopper even have to think?


By the way, the bottom line on the Atlantic salmon sign says "Color added through feed"

Does Lisa Murkowski's Religious Preference Matter?

I've gotten maybe half a dozen hits here from people googling "Lisa Murkowski Jew" or "Lisa Murkowski Jewish."  These people get to a post about Murkowski courting the Jewish vote.    

[UPDATE: Nov. 8 - I'm still getting people asking these questions. At least now they get to this page. If that's how you got here, please, leave a comment below or email me explaining why you wanted to know?]


Sitemeter offers a lot of information about people who get to this site, but it's mostly about their computer's features and their location, not their motivation.

Today I got someone who asked outright, "Is Lisa Murkowski Jewish?"

Why would someone want to know that?  As a Jew whose grandparents all died in Nazi Germany, I get a bit edgy over inquiries like this.  It seems to me there are two basic categories of people wanting to know:

• Jews  - Like any ethnic group in the US, Jews are interested in knowing about members of their group who are prominent and successful.  Some may even be ready to support a candidate because she is Jewish on the (often erroneous) assumption that she would support issues they support.  But Murkowski is not a name that most Jews would think of as likely to be Jewish.  So my guess is that the people googling "Murkowski" and "Jew" are probably NOT Jews.

• Non-Jews - I really don't know why non-Jews would google "Murkowski Jew."  I'm sure there are good, reasonable explanations.  Maybe readers might offer some reasons to help me out here.  But I also know that there are still a lot of White Power websites out there. 

I do think that a candidate's religion can be relevant in an election.  If some candidates' religions play a strong role in their values and will impact decisions they will face as elected officials, then the public has a right to know this so they can vote for the candidates who most closely represent them.

But a candidate's religion doesn't necessarily predict how they will decide specific issues.  Not every Mormon or Catholic or Hindu follows their religious dictates faithfully.  And there are different factions in most religions that differ on important issues.  One simply can't generalize from someone's religion.  Every candidate is an individual.  We need to see the candidates' records and the stands they take.

So I'm still curious about why someone would google "Is Lisa Murkowski a Jew?"  What would it mean to these people to find out that she is or is not Jewish?  Why not just google something like:  "Lisa Murkowski religion"? 

Just for the record, Lisa Murkowski is NOT Jewish.  If you really need to know what her religion is you can check out her Wikipedia page. 

Welcome to Sunny California

There was some light rain Monday morning and again Tuesday afternoon.  Not really enough to get the soil very wet.  But today is different as you can see in this very short video. 

How About an Anchorage MASSOLIT?

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita arrived in the mail last spring.   A friend had sent it and I haven't had a chance to start it until this trip.

On page one we meet

Mikhail Alexandrovich Berloiz. editor of an important literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the largest literary associations in Moscow, known by its initials as MASSOLIT.

Berloiz exits, dramatically, at the end of Chapter 3. ("It was the severed head of Berlioz.")  But it's MASSOLIT that piqued my interest and had me fantasizing such an institution in Anchorage.  (Well, as you'll see below, similar in basic concept, but not in actual execution.)


It's not until Chapter 5 that we get more details about MASSOLIT.  It's housed, for instance, in an old

two-story, cream-colored mansion [called Griboyedov's] . . . set deep within a run-down garden. . .

MASSOLIT made itself at home in Griboyedov's in the cosiest and most comfortable way imaginable.  The visitor at Griboyedov's  was greeted first of all by the announcements of a variety of sports clubs and by the collective as well as individual photographs of members of MASSOLIT, which (photographs) covered the walls of the staircase leading to the upper floor.

On the door of room No. 2 there was a somewhat obscure inscription, ONE-DAY CREATIVE TRIPS.  SEE M. V. PODLOZHNAYA.

The next door bore a short but altogether cryptic sign, PERELYGINO.  Next, the chance visitor to Griboyedov's was all but dizzied by the multitude of signs peppering the ... heavy walnut doors:  REGISTER FOR PAPER WITH POKLEVKINA, PAY OFFICE, SKETCH WRITERS' PERSONAL ACCOUNTS . . .


Cutting across the longest queue, which stretched all the way down to the foyer, one could see the sign HOUSING QUESTION on a door that was constantly being assailed by a crowd of people.
Beyond the housing question a magnificent poster opened to view:  a cliff, and riding on its crest a horseman in a felt cloak, with a rifle behind his back.  A little lower were some palms and a balcony, and, sitting on the balcony, a young man with a tidy tuft of hair over his forehead and a fountain pen in his hand, staring off somewhere into the heights with overconfident, overbold eyes.  The legend read:

FULL-SCALE CREATIVE VACATIONS FROM TWO WEEKS (SHORT STORY) TO ONE YEAR (NOVEL, TRILOGY)  - - - YALTA, SUUK-SU, BOBOVOYE, TSIHIDZIRI, MAHINDZHAURI, LENINGRAD (WINTER PALACE).

In short, MASSOLIT is an organization of writers where housing and work and other recreation can be procured in relatively pleasant surroundings. 
But it isn't all sweetness and light.  Although it does have the best 'restaurant in Moscow, and because this fare was served at the most moderate, most reasonable prices"  it also has problems.

Any visitor at Griblyedov's, unless, of course he was a hopeless dunce, immediatly realized how well these lucky chosen ones - the members of MASSOLIT - were living and was attacked by the blackest envy.  And began at once to send up bitter reproaches to heaven because it had not endowed him at birth with literary talent, whithout which one naturally could not even dream of coming into possession of a MASSOLIT membership card - brown, smelling of good leather, with a wide gilt edge - a card well known throughout Moscow.

Now, I'm not fantasizing a Soviet style literary club in Anchorage with its own mansion, but it is nice to fantasize about a private club of sorts for writers of various types with its own building where people would come to plan collaborative projects with others, to find work or at least grant opportunities, and to eat with friends in a good restaurant. 

I'm assuming that MASSOLIT is modeled after a real place, though the story itself gets rather surrealistic.  The translator's introduction tells us:

After the extraordinary flowering of literature in a great variety of forms in the post-revolutionary decade, the end of the New Economic Policy and the introduction of the Five-Year Plans in the late 1920's brought about a tightening of the reins in literature and arts as well. The party's instrument of pressure and coercion at the time was RAPP (Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) under the leadership of the narrow and intolerant zealot Leopold Averbakh.  And the persecution and pressures applied to writers to force them into the requisite mold succeeded in destroying all but a very small minority which resisted to the end.  Many of the most famous authors became silent or almost silent, either by their own choice, or because their works were barred from publication.  .  .

Bulgakov [the author of The Master and Margarita]  was one of the first writers to be hounded out of literature.  His first novel, The White Guard, the first part of which was serialized in a magazine in 1925, provoked a storm of criticism from party-line critics because it did not portray any Communist heroes, but dealt with the responses of Russian gentry intelligentsia and White officers to the upheavals sweeping the country and destroying all their old values and social norms. 

So, Frank, thanks for the book.  I'd point out that one of the benefits of blogging is that I was forced to go back to the intro which didn't mean all that much when I first read it.  Now I can guess that MASSOLIT might be modeled after RAPP. 

And CS, anything to add?

RG's 20 Second History of Alaska Politics

I ran into RG over a month ago and when he told me his 20 second history of Alaska politics, I just had to have him do it again on video.  But we decided to wait until the various memorials for Ted Stevens were over before posting it.  The time seems ok now.