Pork People
I'm back at Coffee to the People after having breakfast at the Pork Store. I'm sitting at a different table and this one, I'm delighted to find, has a concert poster for "Not In Our Name" an anti-war benefit in Berkeley from 2003 headlined by Ani Difranco, who I love. Cool.
Absalom
p321 Shreve imagining Bon, "...It should have been me that failed; me, I, not he who stemmed from that blood which we both bear before it could have become corrupt and tainted by whatever it was in mother's that he could not brook...."
p323 Still Shreve talking to Quentin, "...and you said North Mississippi is a little harder country than Louisiana, with dogwood and violets and the early scentless flowers but the earth and the nights still a little cold and the hard tight sticky buds like young girls' nipples on alder and Judas trees and beech and maple and even something young in the cedars like he never saw before..."
I haven't a clue what Shreve/Faulkner means by this, or what Ivan/Dostoyevsky means by "sticky little leaves", but it would seem there's some male descriptive tradition here that I've never known about -- though I wonder if it can be traced back to either Goethe or Byron. In this day, however, "sticky buds" sounds like potent cannabis.
"besides knowing that that sherbet [Judith] is there for you to take... and him [Bon] not used to that since all the other cups [women] that had been willing and easy for him to take up hadn't contained sherbet but champagne or at least kitchen wine..."
I must confess here that it's never occurred to me to compare women to beverages. Now I'm also wondering what beverage I would be. This is why reading is so valuable :-|
Next Shreve speculates about how incest might differ from other "fleshly encounter[s]." The idle curiosity of sister-less boys.
Troy 2
Still reading that other book. Finished the part where he covers what is now known about the Hittites and Mycenaeans (some) and about the Trojans and "Sea Peoples" (next to nothing). For someone who has spent far too much time reading and thinking about obscure areas of history (and philosophy) I have very little interest in subjects we are unlikely to ever know much about. The best case scenario would be our discovering some historical text -- carved into clay, probably -- by a precursor of Herodotus. How would we ever be able to judge the veracity of his (or her) account? Maybe "alternative facts" go back a thousand or more years BCE -- in fact I'm sure that they do. (I really like Kellyanne's "alternative facts" coinage. This is a term the study of comparative religion has always needed.)
What's more important? What actually happened over 3000 years ago or what the Attic tragedians, and Homer and the others, were able to make of it. Just as what actually happened to the characters in Absalom, Absalom! (nothing, in fact) is less interesting than what Quentin and Shreve see in this Rorschach-like story.
You can even say that what Trump does will be less interesting (though it does look like it's going to be compelling TV) than what the rest of us do with this situation. Will this turn into America's "Finest Hour" or, as an article I read suggested, is this just a Hegelian thesis, antithesis situation waiting for a synthesis.
My tendency to see American history as an echo of the Roman Republic is consistent with this Hegelian view, I think. Though I'd never thought of Roman History in that way. I've always viewed the swings between the popular and senatorial Roman factions as like a machine falling out of balance and finally toppling over. But I guess you can see the Empire as a kind of synthesis. And of course the core of this synthesis was that, while the Roman people continued to hold elections and the offices of the Republic remained, the real power was removed from their hands. If anyone before had doubts about why one would want to do that, they should be gone now.
Though I still think there is a chance for a synthesis that preserves the Republic. But that could change if The Opposition can't get it's shit together in the next several years. If instead we go all Italian, I'll have to reconsider the desirability of the Imperium.
Finally
Our rains are finally letting up. On the one hand I don't mind: We've got a good supply of water and snow, and I would like to start getting back to the gym regularly. On the other hand, now people are going outside to smoke again. Now we'll get to see if the air cleaner I bought for myself at Christmas actually works.
Life goes on
The world may be going to hell but I just had my favorite vegan breakfast at the Pork Store and now I'm having tea at Coffee to the People, so life is good for the moment.
Leaving home this morning I ran into the owner of the lower level unit, she was overseeing the dance of vehicles in our alley as four or five cars and trucks pulled out into the street so that the van with her new carpet could get back to our building. For some reason, the people doing construction next door work even longer hours on Saturday than on weekdays. Sometimes, and this was true yesterday as well, the alley is blocked even after the normal quitting time of 4pm. My latest plan for "landscaping" our back yard is to put down tarps and observe how they drain until the construction is complete next door, or until I have a much better idea when we can schedule a delivery of 60 bags of gravel and not run into an alley parking jam.
Speaking of construction, yesterday I walked past a guy finishing some newly replaced cement on a Grant street sidewalk. The rest of the sidewalk there has an unusual pattern and he was doing a skillful job of matching it. The reason I noticed him was that he had brought his dog to the work site. The dog was lying comfortably on a blanket the guy had laid out on the sidewalk adjacent to where he was working. Nice gig for everyone concerned.
Not again!
As if things weren't bad enough this week. Walking past Union Square on my way to breakfast this morning I was shocked to see the big Christmas tree is already up and decorated. I'm interested to see if we will get our subway construction zone streets back for the shopping season -- as we always have in the past. Now that they are working on the station, I don't think they can just cover everything up with fake grass for a few weeks. Hope I'm wrong.
History!
I just ran into something amazing on Medium. This relates both to the Holocaust and to the subject of the Faustian/Mephistophelian character of the Jewish bourgeoisie. I'm amazed I've never heard about this. HERE's the link. Only think what Goethe could have done with this story. Or Dostoevsky.
Photographs
Many apartments have narrow hallways which it is a common practice to line with small photos or paintings. My tiny apartment also has a sort of tiny hallway. It is about two inches wider than my bathroom door and is just over a foot long -- or deep.
Since I can't spread photos out horizontally in such a small space, I stack them vertically. There are group shots of friends and people I've worked with going back to the late 1970s. My pre-bookstore days, bookstore days, and various phases of my programming career are covered in these photos. Today I also noticed that a total of five of the people pictured are dead: three as a result of the AIDS epidemic and two from cancer. (I'm not still in touch with all the other people so I can't say they are all still alive, but these are the only deaths I'm aware of.)
I think it's remarkable that I can't think of anyone I know personally who has died violently -- as a result of a car or bike accident or crime or earthquake. I know "of" people like this, I just don't know the victims myself. Historically, I suspect this is quite odd for someone in their mid-60s.
Nostalgia
I'm at Coffee To the People in the Haight. I've worked here a number of times -- they have an excellent waste diversion layout -- but I never noticed until just now that their small tables are covered with political images (stickers and signs) from the '60s and '70s. The causes of my youth all laid out under resin -- or maybe just varnish. I suspect they are not "real" artifacts from the period but reproductions intended for coffee house tables.
Curiously, it was the ERA table I'm sitting at (that I'm pretty sure I've sat at before) that caught my eye. The next table over, I then noticed, has a larger "What if they gave a War and nobody came..." mini-poster that I recognize from back in the day. Things seemed so simple then: War bad; Peace good. Now we really want to do something about Syria and ISIS but what, exactly, quickly becomes vague.
It's rather like the situation with the black community and the police. The black community -- everyone, really -- wants the police to address the crime that plagues their neighborhoods... if only they could do that without harming or harassing any blacks or other minorities. It has occurred to me before that the only politically correct solution is to encourage white criminals to victimize communities of color so that the police can then deal with them without offending anyone.
Now that the Philippines seems to be joining the new Axis of Crazy, Vietnam is looking to be our natural ally vs China in Southeast Asia. Aside from the older generation of the Vietnamese refugee community (especially in the South Bay, here) -- which is likely to become more of an embarrassment over time -- no one in the U.S. really cares much about Vietnam one way or the other. That was just some nonsense that happened a long time ago. (I would hate to have to teach that history in school. And that our "Camelot" was standing knee-deep in that political insanity makes it even worse. "Yes, the great JFK was waging a nonsensical war that was not in the interest of the country's national security because it would have looked bad politically to do otherwise." And that was back in the good old days before U.S. politics went all to hell. No wonder they don't even try to teach civics anymore... at least I think that's true.
