Morning jolt: May 30, 2014

Michelle Huneven again: Altadena’s native-born novelist appeared in last Sunday’s “Modern Love” section of the New York Times, with this memoir of how, by transference to her smart, balding Jewish therapist, she wound up with a smart, balding, Jewish husband.  It’s a sweet story.

Octavia Butler:  Another author who spent time in Altadena is featured in the Huntington Library’s members’ magazine, Huntington Frontiers.  The Library acquired the papers of Butler, a pioneering female African American writer of science fiction and fantasy, who died in 2006.  Archivist Natalie Russell writes about the task of classifying a lifetime’s worth of papers in “Beyond Categories,” a story not available online. A Butler exhibition is planned for 2017.

Guerrilla in the midst:  Frontiers also has a feature by Diane W. Thompson (also not online) about botanist Cody Howard’s search through Namibia for varieties of Ledebouria, a flowering succulent. Howard’s love for succulents and other desert plant life can be seen every day in the “guerrilla garden” he established along a sound wall on north Altadena Drive, winner of a Golden Poppy award for outstanding local garden.  (Howard had no permission to turn the blasted strip of dry county land into a desert garden — he just went ahead and did it.  Seems to be a trait that’s served him well!)