Your fair-weather blogger is travel-studying political science and history at the University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College. After four days away in Edinburgh (including an amazing hike), I’m just settling into classes, and midterms are already here.

In a lot of ways, this is turning out to be the vacation I wanted—limited email, no projects, lots of books, and an information diet. In others, it’s not a vacation at all—whoever told you that Travel-Study courses are cakewalks was lying. They’re tough, discussion-based liberal arts classes.

It’s a change of pace.

Still, I think photos are the fun part, so I’m collecting them on Flickr. Cheers!

“I don’t think any movement has ever made much progress based on guilt,” he commented. “Guilt is passive, inhibitive. Successful movements are built on passion, on confidence, on Teddy Roosevelt’s bully pulpit, on critical mass. The environmental movement has switched from being powered by guilt to something much more positive and dynamic … capable of bringing about revolutionary change.”

I’m not sure I agree that the environmental movement is quite there yet.  I don’t think that it is in Southern California.  Do you buy local for the public kudos, or with a grim sense of responsibility?

Still, I loved his insight into the message that environmentalism advocates often send, and I find it pretty convincing that guilt can’t work.  I have to wonder: what other messages are D.O.A. until activists squash the liberal guilt out of them?

This morning I drove to campus. The streetlights were without power, traffic was clogged, and I couldn’t turn on the air conditioner without the wind blasting ash into the cabin. The sky was black and red. It’s 5:12 P.M. now, and the sky’s back to blue, albeit unnaturally dark, and huge blocks of Irvine keep losing power. Classes went on without a hitch, but for the occasional missing person fretting about their family, or in at least one case, his BMW. (Only in Orange County.)

Nobody’s panicking, but everything feels decidedly wrong.

Social media is helping me keep tabs on the nearest fire, in Santiago Canyon:

• Special search for “santiago fire” on Flickr
• Technorati search for “santiago fire”
• YouTube search for “santiago canyon fire”

Update at 6:43 P.M.: Just met a lady at the grocery store who tells me new homeowners near the fire are figuring out why their bedrooms have sprinklers in them.

Good evening.

My name is John Hodgman. I am a former professional literary agent, which on a good day is a pretty small thing to be, and these days feels rather microscopic. Before I was a professional literary agent, I thought it would be a good idea to be a teacher of fiction in a college MFA program because it is easy and you are adored all the time and of course it pays a lot of money.

I used to have a lot of bright ideas.

I even had two lessons planned out, which, by all accounts from MFA programs that I’ve heard, is one more than you need. The first would address the comfort of storytelling. I would explain to my adoring students that stories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

Not a very original idea, but one that seemed more or less reasonable before something happened that showed us how perversely powerful stories can be when told into the ears of desperate and evil men, and showed as well how sadly challenged stories are in providing comfort now. What happened on Tuesday was enormous, sublime in the darkest sense of the word, so large as to overwhelm our ability to describe it, to sense it except in parts, and certainly to order it and make it make sense. In the immediate aftermath, we have only our very personal flash memories, but personalizing an event that has touched so many and so cruelly, announcing by byline our own survival, feels shamefully self-involved. To convert this experience into metaphor, into symbolic gesture, feels almost offensive when we are still pressed by such an urgent reality that is ongoing and uncontainable by words.

I have heard a lot recently about the role of writing, song, music, painting, in the tragic blank space in our souls that this event has left behind. Of course, this preoccupation is largely a result of an unconscious bias of the media. If pig farmers had as much currency with NPR as literary novelists, we would be hearing just as much about the healing power of bacon. And knowing that power well, I can say that it is certainly comparable to the reading of a sensitive short story as far as comfort goes; and yet both fall far below the direct aid that is being passed from person to person, below Chambers Street, in our homes, on the phone with strangers, with an actual touch, in the actual, nonsymbolic, unannotated world of grief in which we live. The great temptation is to be silent, forever, in sympathy.

The second lesson plan that I had in those days was a very lazy assessment of storytelling’s function, beginning in the oral tradition, when it served a civic purpose aside from getting you invited to cocktail parties. As I would explain to my adoring students, storytelling served initially in every culture three purposes: to inform, as in relay news and record history, to instruct, as in pass down a set of moral guidelines, and to entertain. We are, as regards this event and its unfolding, all too well informed. And as for entertainment: when I thought this was a bright idea, it was when I was younger and war seemed so far away. But I realize now that those in history whose lives were short and mean and threatened by sword and disease gathered and told stories not as leisure, but as desperately needed distraction, and reassurance that they were not alone.

So if art cannot contain or describe this event, and if for now the suffering is too keen to be alleviated by parable … if stories are for the moment not as critically needed, as courage, as medicine, as blood, as bacon, they can at least revert to this social function. As time goes on, this will all pass away into memory, into a story with a beginning and a middle and finally an end. And that transition from the real into fable will bring its own kind of comfort and pain. Now, though, we may gather and distract one another, take comfort in our proximity, and know that we are, at this moment, safe.

Not many of my ideas seem bright anymore, and I am not a teacher. I am only humbled: to be here, to be alive.

That is all.