Previous - 150. Original sin
Vertigo
"Il ritorno in patria"p193-194 The elaboration here of the furniture and necessary accouterments of the German petite bourgeois makes me wonder how these habits started. Why did the narrator's parents have a bone china tea service they never used? Why do I have my family's silver and silver plate and china that is very rarely used -- like the suburban living rooms that we all had and that I only recall my family using on the day after my father died. (And I imagine we sat there then because it lacked associations with my father.)
I do know, or at least I have a working theory, why we have the silver spoons and cups given to bourgeois infants -- silver has natural antibacterial characteristics and should have been safer than other materials for children with developing immune systems. (I may even be right, see here.) What I don't know -- because I never thought to ask -- is if these items were actually used. Some of the little cups are pretty battered, which would argue for use, but perhaps they were only played with and not used for eating and drinking. Does anyone still do this? I can't imagine it.
This is the part of the book where the narrator's -- Sebald's -- memory is most on display. His memory of his childhood in W., and of all the details of W., is quite wonderful, though I can't say it leaves Proust or even James Thurber behind.
Here's an interesting passage where the narrator finally calls on someone, from his youth, still living in the village,
p210 ...He had seen me coming out of the Engelwirt [inn where he is staying] several times, he told me straight away, but although I had somehow seemed familiar, he had not quite been able to place me, perhaps because I reminded him not so much of the child I once was as of my grandfather who had the same gait and, whenever he stepped out of the house, would pause for a moment to peer up into the sky to see what the weather was doing, just as I always did. I felt my visit pleased Lukas, for after working as a tin-roofer until his fiftieth year he had been forced into retirement by the arthritis that was gradually crippling him... He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside... He particularly agreed when I said that over the years I had puzzled out a good deal in my own mind, [about his past in W.] but in spite of that, far from becoming clearer, things now appeared to me more incomprehensible than ever. The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.... [Reading Proust Was a Neuroscientist wouldn't have made Sebald feel any better.]
Cherry Blossom Festival
My weekend didn't turn out the way I had expected. I was supposed to work another day around the food court (a block of Webster Street) at CBF and then switch to Sisters in the Park (Golden Gate) on Sunday. I did start the day in Hellman Hollow, but it was raining -- not hard but steadily -- and almost no one showed up. Instead of 10,000 people we had a hundred or so and most of them seemed to be Sisters (of Perpetual Indulgence).I really hate just standing around, and standing around in the rain is even worse. One of my favorites was crew chiefing this event, so I suggested she check with the crew chief at CBF to see how they were doing. It seems two people didn't show up for their shifts so I was sent back to Japantown (by car service, more on this in a moment.)
So I got the mid-day shift I prefer and I still got to close out CBF, which I like to do every year. We were a little wet, it's true, but it wasn't that bad and there were no bags left to sort when I left. That's success in this business. But back to Golden Gate Park for a moment.
I hadn't been to Hellman Hollow (formerly Speedway Meadow) since Hardly Strictly Bluegrass last October. The park is stunning at any time, but by the end of summer it looks like California -- brown except where people water. At least that's true at ground level, the trees stay green. Jump ahead almost half a year now near the end of a very wet rainy season and the park, like California in general, is lush. Green is the color of this season just as brown is the color of the dry season.
The last time I stood in that meadow (in the daylight) it was filled with a hundred thousand people and there was dust and dry undergrowth under the trees. And it was hot. On Sunday it was green and wet and cool and most of the crowd were Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in full drag. (Not real Sisters, I'm bound to say, since they, the originals in normal nun's habits, usually roller skates, mostly died in the AIDS epidemic.)
I hope we work another event here before October, but if not I tried to capture the place as it is in April so I can call that image up in October when it's in the 90sF and I'm ready to kill the vendors and concert goers. I'm almost a Buddha.
When I was reassigned to CBF, my first thought was to take the bus over, which is how I had come to Golden Gate Park, but the crew chief suggested the car service and, being aware of how what should take 30 minutes can turn into far longer with Muni, especially on a Sunday, I agreed. It was some ride sharing service that pools riders. I was the first pickup, but he picked up two more people and dropped off one before dropping me off. It wasn't a big time saver, (over 30 minutes) but then again I was sitting inside a nice car instead of waiting (in the rain) for buses and then riding in those buses. (And the 38 line is one of the most crowded in the system.)
But what interested me was that, years ago, I had imagined a better taxi/shuttle service just like this. It was like seeing an idea realized without having to do any of the work.
The funny thing was that the third person to be picked up was in the other side of the park where my company was working a third event -- Eggstravaganza. This is an Easter event for kids I worked several years ago. It's charming but slow. I prefer the busyness of CBF.
Finally, I kept thinking on Sunday about how I now have an event overlay for so many parts of the City. This is similar to, but not quite the same as, my City-that-was overlay. The latter comes into play when you walk out of a restaurant wondering where the car is parked and someone recalls that we parked in front of Winterland -- a famous music venue that was redeveloped decades ago. What I'm talking about is when we are in the park not for HSB yet refer to locations by what stage is there for HSB. Or when I walk through Japantown on the way to a film and see the eco stations I maintained or the mountain of bags I collected for the last, totally insane, J-Pop Festival held there. Even at Union Square in my neighborhood, every time I walk past I think of all the trash toters I've wheeled around these sidewalks and I can see, as though I had X-ray vision, where the dumpsters are down in the garage and where the restroom is that the public doesn't have access to.
QCD
I've been struggling with gluons this afternoon... I know, who isn't these days? A massless "particle" (what does that even mean) that is confined to a hadron but supposedly travels at c. Previously I had ignored this abomination when puzzling over hadrons thinking it was just a way of talking about the strong force that holds quarks together, but it seems these little nasties participate in the chromatic craziness.I wasn't surprised when I jumped to Wiki and noticed that Murray Gell-Mann is the man responsible for gluons. (I can't help smiling every time I run into another Feynman diagram used to illustrate QCD.)
I so wish Feynman had tackled QCD. I'm sure he could have come up with something better than this chroma metaphor.
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