292. Bastille Day, AIDS Walk, and Genji

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Genji

Something I’m really enjoying about this book is the short length of many of the chapters. They can be as short as a page or two. Almost like prose haiku. Genji is continuing to be an overly attentive guardian to Tamakazura. He is her music instructor now. I’ve learned to trust Murasaki S., but I do wonder what she’s about here. Tamakazura’s father has discovered another daughter by-blow (the Omi Lady) and brought her to his house, where she has become a source of amusement to everyone. Tamakazura and her ally within Genji’s household, we are told, now appreciate the wisdom of her not going directly to her father, but this seems a bit contrived as the two young women would seem to be nothing alike. And of course then her half brothers wouldn’t be falling in love with her -- not clear to me if they have actually seen or conversed with her. 

Genji’s day-to-day life as a Chancellor and older person longing for a life of retirement seems quite similar to his younger days except that now he maintains a compound full of past, present, and possibly future paramours. He is currently living with two daughters of men he knows and associates with, and I don’t think either of them are aware of this, I know Tamakazura’s father doesn’t know. Not sure about Murasaki’s father. (Yes he does. This comes out later when Tamakazura is mated off with the husband of another of his daughters.)

This would be a fascinating book to read with a feminist book club... though I would be a little concerned for my own safety. 

A few words about the binding of this edition of the book. The cloth cover is quite lovely, the spine is covered in purple cloth -- wisteria purple being Murasaki’s color and the meaning of the name. The majority of the cover looks like handmade paper or very subtle marbling and there’s a leafy symbol in gold at the top right of the front cover. Haven’t been able to determine what it means as yet, but it is quite handsome. 

All in all a very good looking book. The work is divided into two volumes which fit into a hard case which I haven’t looked at as yet.

Days later: I just noticed that the Knopf borzoi is embossed into the back of the cover. Lovely touch.

The Royal Outing
The Omi lady is yet another character who could have been written by Jane Austen. She has some Mary Bennett about her and perhaps a little Mrs Elton as well. If someone were to do a version of Genji set at a much later date, she could be the half-American daughter who doesn’t get Japanese customs. And Lydia Bennett! This only struck me at the end of The Cyress Pillar, but it’s probably the most apt. I retract the other suggestions and will go with Lydia.

As appalling as some of the gender relations are here, when you remember this is the 10th century it’s an amazingly civil society. A European equivalent would probably be even more appalling.

Purple Trousers
Besides the brevity of these chapters, the other remarkable thing about them is that almost nothing is happening. Mostly a series of interviews with poetry, where either Tamakazura or Murasaki are concealed behind screens or in another room and communicating through one of their women. I’ve started to imagine additional chapters in which the young lady is tipsy and flatulent. And her poems are rude limericks.

Bastille Day

Aside from our not having a single toter to help with carting around our equipment and the bags of trash, this event went quite smoothly. Most of the day was on the boring side. The turnout seemed better this year, I suspect because of the World Cup, with all the French expats feeling more French than usual. (See also notes on the following day.)

The entertainment started at 4:00pm -- maybe earlier than last year -- and was mostly cover bands. The last group was the best. They played popular music from the 1960s sung in French. I always hope for “French” music I haven’t heard before but always get the usual hits from the ‘60s but in French. The musicians were older guys, but the two singers were young women dressed in what I would describe as Carnaby Street fashions. They looked quite smart; and sang well. 

Since we are so much aware of our bad luck, I have to mention an instance of quite striking good luck. Recology provided us with four,  six yard dumpsters for the event. This would give us one dumpster for each trash stream plus a spare if we ran out of room for something -- or we could have made one a dedicated cardboard dumpster. Except that when we (not me personally) arrived, one of the dumpsters already contained a bunch of trash and a wheelchair. “We” sorted everything else, but left the wheelchair. 

At the end of the day we locked up the dumpsters so people don’t steal even more of the recycling and, more importantly, don’t contaminate what we’ve sorted. These dumpsters are quite battered, so if was hard to get even one of the two possible locking points to work for the three dumpsters we had used. But, finally we got them locked up and turned to the dumpster we had left empty except for the wheelchair. This one was so mangled we could do nothing with it. We so lucked out.

AIDS Walk 2018

(I think my 3rd AIDS Walk)
Walking down my hill on the way to breakfast and then work, I saw a mass of people blocking Powell Street opposite the Sir Francis Drake Hotel and heard, for the second day in a row, the strains of Le Marseillais. And that was how I learned the French had won the World Cup.

AIDS Walk has always been a mess and last year it was a disaster. I had to stay over an extra two hours past the end of my shift just to get things in order so we could finally leave. But I complained and made a bunch of suggestions and, surprise, I was listened to. This year was almost easy.

There were still a half dozen or more trash boxes provided by a lubricant company on the field, but they were mostly backstage or on the periphery. Scores of these satanic objects were collected early on and tossed into recycling -- I had been harping about these boxes for the previous 24 hours. 

The problem with these boxes are that they are not part of our three stream system. People throw everything into them. And sometimes they aren’t even lined, so you can’t even pull out a bag of trash and sort it. You have to cart around the entire box full of mixed trash.

With these boxes mostly off the field, there were also fewer places for people to throw trash that we had to then sort. This is actually a good thing. When I arrived at 1pm, there was no pile of trash bags at the dumpsters and no one was sorting there. Last year at that point there was already a hopelessly large pile of bags, as volunteers were pulling anything close to a full bag and bringing it to the dumpsters to be sorted. This year, more of our people were sorting on the field and the volunteers were only hauling bags we had pulled and that didn’t need further sorting. The usual system. Yes, it works here too... surprise!

And the post walk entertainment this year was better. As I was walking up to the event, at Sharon Meadow in Golden Gate Park, I suddenly remembered just how awful the entertainment has been in the past. Usually it’s people who are famous (or wealthy) for something else who also have a cover band in their spare time. Last year, maybe, the lead singer really couldn’t carry a tune. But this year the final acts were people known for their participation on RuPaul’s Drag Race. I didn’t know them, but some were spectacularly good, and they could all carry a tune. For the first time I felt bad for the entertainers because so many walkers don’t hang around for the show. In the past this has been a sign of good taste and self-preservation. Plus the wind was getting fierce.


The main drama of the day had to do with someone hiding the keys to a rental truck in a place that was impossible to get to without having the keys. I had nothing to do with this debacle, so I just ignored it. I was cajoled into driving said truck, once the keys had been expensively retrieved, back to U-haul. I was supposed to put a couple gallons of gas into it before returning the truck, but, for the life of me, I could not get the pump to work. It’s probably been over a decade since I’ve bought gas, but you wouldn’t think the process would have changed so much. I still have no idea what I was doing wrong. 

177. Johnson & Montaigne

Previous - 176. Grace & satori

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Johnson & Montaigne

Finally back to Montaigne. Reading this, short, section is such a pleasure to me. This is a mongrel of a book, I'm not sure all these people really fit together in any meaningful way, regardless of how many This or That categories you come up with. And Montaigne is the one who is most out of place. He's comfortable in his own skin and amused by what he finds in the world and in himself. He's philosophical in the best sense of the term.

But he also, if only by contrast, shows how all these other people are either naturally, or because of the culture they grew up in, at odds with their nature and struggling -- mostly unsuccessfully -- against themselves. This reminds me of the Buddhist/Hindu tendency to want to transcend and stop the wheel from turning, which is countered by the tantra (I think?) notion that even transcendence is something of an illusion. That there's nothing wrong with this world we are already in.

Montaigne would understand that, but Augustine and Day and Johnson would not. This book is supposedly about character building, but there is a sense in which our characters can't be altered. Day and Johnson could perpetually struggle against their character, but they could not transcend it. Even Eisenhower was at best able to keep a lid on his temper most of the time. He never became a person who didn't have issues with anger management. "The Road to Recovery" might have been a better title for this book. 

It should come as no surprise that Brooks's judgement of Johnson and Montaigne is rather different than mine,

p234  We can each of us decide if we are a little more like Montaigne or a little more like Johnson, or which master we can learn from on which occasion. For my part I'd say that Johnson, through arduous effort, built a superior greatness. He was more a creature of the active world... Most important, Johnson understood that it takes some hard pressure to sculpt a character... There has to be some pushing, some sharp cutting, and hacking. It has to be done in confrontation with the intense events of the real world, not in retreat from them. Montaigne had such a genial nature, maybe he could be shaped through gentle observation. Most of us will end up mediocre and self-forgiving if we try to do that.

I have to confess that I've been unfair to Johnson and Brooks both by not including the account of Johnson's childhood and youth. That he achieved so much is truly astonishing, and a great story of someone overcoming every obstacle in life. My point is that, while he became a great success (and I do envy his association with Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon and the rest), as presented here by Brooks, he did not become a particularly happy person. Though this may just mean that I would not want to trade places with him while I could trade places with Montaigne. (Perhaps "trade minds", would be a better way of putting it.)

And Brooks isn't blind to the difference in the two that I'm talking about,

p236  ...He [Johnson] never achieved the equanimity that seems to have marked Montaigne's mature years, or the calmness and reserve he admired in others. He lived all his life with periodic feelings of despair, depression, shame, masochism, and guilt...

Bastille Day

I've been greening events now for 10 years and I have to say that this was the oddest one I've ever worked. When I arrived at 11:00 AM, the vendors were all setup and doing a bit of business. There was a stage for music that was still being hooked-up. The music didn't start until 6 PM, and that's when a crowd finally arrived and the vendors started taking down their booths. 

There was never much in the way of trash for us to sort. I pulled from all the stations on a regular basis, but I had to wait between each round to give the trash some time to build up. After 6 PM the "beer garden" finally got crowded so there was a steady stream of empty wine bottles to pull, but that was the only time a trash can got full.

Which brings me to the highlight of my day. After my second or third trip to empty the wine bottle can (and also collect the packing material used to protect the bottles -- it's the same paper product used in egg cartons, but bigger, though still very light in weight) I suggested to the crew chief that we take another can to them so they would have a backup and thus wouldn't run out of space even if we were delayed in cleaning out the cans. 

He came with me bringing the can and we cleaned out everything that vendor had and set them up with the backup can. But then we noticed the vendor next to them had a stack of the same paper packing thingies. We were on the other side of a little fence and couldn't reach them, but Tyler finally got the attention of someone at that other vendor station. First the guy was very suspicious of what we wanted with the pile of trash, as though we were random people trying to steal something valuable. Once we convinced him (green shirts with company logo and trash toter being our tokens of authority) he proceeded to hand them to Tyler one at a time, rather than just picking up the entire pile which together weight almost nothing. We were cracking up. Tyler was going to carry them to the dumpsters, but I still had room in the toter and said that, and added that he should just give them to me... one at a time.

Perhaps we had been in the hot sun too long.

Next - 178. Big vs Little Me