193. You will have only one story

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Jack London

A passage from Elizabeth Strout's My Name Is Lucy Barton struck me as I'm re-reading the book. Here she's quoting a famous writer acquaintance, 

"You will have only one story," she had said. "You'll write your one story many ways. Don't ever worry about story. You have only one."

And this made me think about the Jack London story "South of the Slot," set in SF I just read. (See HERE.) One of my first thoughts was that it could also have been titled "The Call of the Wild." But now I'm wondering to what extent Buck is just an animal version of Big Bill Totts in this story. Buck came first, in 1903, but did London have Bill Totts in mind all along, and thought it would be easier to sell an allegorical tale set in the Yukon?

But what I've been thinking about even more, is that Jack London is the person I would like to talk to about what's going wrong in America. I think his perspective on the gentrification of South of the Slot, now called SOMA, would be very interesting. The world he described in this story is almost totally gone now. There are some last vestiges around 6th and Mission, but in general, the infrastructure that supported the lower and under classes in this part of the city has been methodically destroyed (phase one of "urban renewal") or is in the process of being re-purposed for the benefit of the middle and upper classes. 

The flop-houses and SROs that Thomas Pynchon wrote about in The Crying of Lot 49 are virtually gone now along with most of the work that provided a living for the people living South of the Slot. Even the shipyard around pier 70 is in the process of being transformed into a mixed use development with tech incubators and a thousand to two thousand units of new, up-to-code, housing. Is it any wonder that the descendants of the people London was writing about here, thought voting for Trump would be worth a shot? Even if they don't get anything out of it, it's still worth it for riling up the gentry.

And there's another side to this gentrification of South of the Slot, the trashification of the north. I wrote the paragraphs above at the Peet's on Market and then walked home -- across where the slot once was -- and through the heart of the previously posh Union Square shopping district. Based on the businesses you see lining the sidewalks of Grant street, the area is even more posh now than it was in the past, but when you look at the crowds on those sidewalks the picture changes. And not just because this in near the end of the peak tourist season. The days of hats on men and women, and gloves on women is long gone. If you were to bring back a gentleman or lady from London's time (or as late as the 1950s) they would be appalled by the vagrants and scavengers, but the commonness of the shoppers and sightseers would be just as shocking. I'm pretty sure they would see this as an invasion from South of the Slot, culturally if not strictly based on residential addresses.

Where Liberals meet the Alt-right

This weekend there's a to-do in town over some Alt-Right group attempting to demonstrate in town, or on the Presidio -- which is almost, though not quite, SF. What amuses me about this is that the thing you can not say in polite (liberal) circles is that most of the people who are making the most noise against the White Separatist factions, already live in (defacto) White Separatist suburbs. (These are the same people who drive their cars, granted many of them are hybrids, to oil pipeline protests.) 

First generation at university

I woke up Sunday to a news radio report on a California program to assist students who are the first in their family to attend university. It occurred to me that that would have applied to me, while I was in school, so I started paying more attention. One of the characteristics of these novice students, according to the report, was not speaking up in class or asking questions. This would be amusing to anyone who shared classes with me. Though, to be fair to the program, I was not at all typical since I had practically grown up on college campuses.

184. Our electric future

Previous - 183. Seeing the end

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Last time on Bloggity-blog...

Last time I talked about getting a glimpse or foreshadowing of the end of life or my event season. This morning I realized there is another way this is true just now. Below is a picture of the poor tree that grows in a pot in our alley. 

Last year it suffered all kinds of injury and indignity as it was pushed about the alley by various workmen before finally coming to rest outside my alley window. And then someone knocked off yet another limb for no reason I'm aware of.

But here it is, fully leafed out on its few remaining limbs, and doing surprisingly well. Except that I happen to know that it is already preparing for winter. It's going through the process of pulling the things it still wants out of its leaves and putting the waste it doesn't want into those leaves. Soon the leaves will all drop -- over a surprisingly short period of days -- and it will be bare for the winter. 

This is especially odd here as the tree's peak growing season -- when the days are longest and the sun is highest in the sky -- doesn't mesh with our warm weather, which will start in maybe a month, at which point the tree will probably be bare. Maybe if it was a species of tree that was native to this area it would have a cycle more consistent with our weather? I don't know. If it was in the ground instead of this pot, I'm pretty sure it would keep its leaves longer, so the fact that it is already starting to hibernate wouldn't be obvious. But it does serve to remind me that natural processes are going on all around us that we are unaware of. That appearances can be deceiving.

My Name Is...

I'm finished reading but not finished thinking about this novel. It's the story of a daughter, a wife, a mother, and a writer. Aside from it being fiction, it is remarkably similar to the memoirist parts of Salie Tisdale's collection of essays. 

It would be nice to have a book that mashed together the stories of families where the husband left the wife, the wife left the husband, and neither left but someone probably should have. The children would all be resentful of different things. Maybe one of them would be aware that the adults were all just doing the best they could. But this probably wouldn't be the kid who was the biggest screw-up his or herself.

And we never do get the hinted nasty bits of the story. I don't exactly mind that, except that it means we can't judge the protagonist's actions. If we knew we would be in a position to say she acted correctly or incorrectly -- from our perspective -- but as it is we have to give her the benefit of the doubt. Not that that's a bad thing, but it does seem a little unfair. Or a little too uncritical.

Cafe calculus

Or, "Life is hard, Yo." I'm at the Peet's on Market because I got off BART at Powell and because it's the weekend  (so the Bank Cafe isn't open). Besides having to pay an extra dollar for my iced tea here, I'm also subjected to the hits from the 1960s. At the Bank Cafe, the music is better (usually) but the WiFi (while better than it was) still sucks. The Specialty Cafe (also, sort-of Peet's) has better seating, but costs a little more and has WiFi that is usually in the middle, plus they are also closed on the weekend and even during the week they close early (5 pm, I think). There's a Starbucks that has excellent WiFi and similar prices, but I'm not fond of Starbucks and they also have very limited seating. 

Yesterday I went to Caffe Grecco in North Beach because I wanted a change of pace and because I wanted to thoroughly browse the new hardware store there -- I suddenly realized that it was about the same distance as the one I usually go to (same company) but there is less of a change in elevation going to this new one. It does seem to be well stocked and not as busy.

An optimistic future

Recently I read a piece that spun several current trends in a very positive direction. The author saw electric, self-driving cars leading to a world with relatively few, long-lasting cars serving the majority of people. This would reduce drastically the need for oil (at least 30%) which would lead to a collapse of that industry and an end to both drilling and pollution (including greenhouse gases). Parked cars would become a thing of the past, freeing space for people and bicycles and for housing where there are parking lots and garages today. 

The author thought these changes would have job creation effects that would balance the obvious job loses of people who currently drive or work in the oil and automobile industries. I didn't buy that, so I didn't bother to remember the job creation details. I will give the scheme credit for preserving the value of suburban real estate, since it preserves automobiles in a new form. Since we appear to be too stupid now to build neighborhoods that work, I would rather see a return to public transit and walking, but I do think the autonomous electric car dream is more realistic. Even I would give in and buy a smartphone so I could access these vehicles when the prices were reduced to reflect the lack of a driver. 

Next - 185. Almost a holiday

183. Seeing the end

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My Name Is...

I'm liking the meditative pacing of this novel. There's not much of a plot so far. The protagonist is stuck in the hospital and her mother, who she never sees, has come to stay with her. They converse and then there are sections either about her childhood or about her life after she left home, either before or after the hospital stay. Meanwhile here in SF the pavement is damp.

We were warned by the meteorologists that the pavement might get damp today, and now it's happened. (Bystander to news person: "This is such a quiet and dry neighborhood, this sort of thing never happens around here. Since all those high-tech hipsters started moving in everything has been going down hill. I'd move if I could").

I'd heard that Arizona, or at least Tucson, was having a particularly vigorous monsoon, and it's gotten so vigorous that it has been drenching SoCal and now dampening our pavements. Is nothing sacred? To add injury to insult, there's not enough moisture to wash the sidewalks clean, but the air is humid enough to bring out the smell of urine and shit. The weather is supposed to return to normal by Sunday.

Strout got me again. Right after saying there was no plot, I hit her describing a traumatic incident from their childhood -- mostly involving her dad and her brother, but of course the remainder of the family also. The hints about her father are coming so slowly that I thought, after the PTSD from an incident in WW2, that she was done. But no.

And there was just an incident where we saw how rude it could be to psychoanalyze someone based on their reaction to something, so now we see her father's nasty reaction to catching his son wearing women's clothes and how can we not think, "Hmmm?" Could he really be both closeted and suffering from PTSD? It does make a sort of sense.

Work

For some reason, there is always a slow work patch here in August. It should only be this weekend that I'm not working, but I'm skipping the big Outside Lands concert again this year, too, which will make it two weekends in a row. There's a slight chance I will pick-up a Monday shift right after the concert, but I really don't like back-end, table sorting. Especially eight straight hours of it. This is what I work hard at the front-end to avoid, but we don't do the front-end for OL.

I think the real reason I'm even considering taking the Monday shift is that I suddenly realized there are only two months left of the 2017 event season. And since Moscone Center (our convention center) is currently torn apart in the latest expansion effort, the big conventions that usually follow the event season will not be happening here this year. 2017 is becoming rather like a book when you notice you are in the second to last signature of the binding. 

There are the two big events I look forward to (train for) all year -- the Dragon Boat Races and Hardly Strictly Bluegrass -- and a couple other events that can be fun or a pain -- the big one being Art & Soul in Oakland in two weeks. Beyond that, some other things will probably appear on the schedule, maybe even after HSB, but the end is almost in sight.


A couple days ago I heard people upstairs and went up to investigate, it was my neighbor and his son trying to decide what to do with the floor of the unit, as they try to rent the place out. The son is about my age and the father in his early 80s with some heart problems, but otherwise he and his wife are still going strong. But the son is supposed to be taking over the business of the condo rental. They are both very much alike, so it seems to be going pretty smoothly, but it's odd to see that particular father making way for his son. He too seems to have a sense of the end coming into view.

Why there was a gap

I can't believe that it's taken me so long to think of this, but since partial conditioning is more effective than constant (?) conditioning, it really makes sense for me to not post every single day -- which I've tried to do when blogging. So this may become the new normal.

Next - 184. Our electric future

182. Of this and that

Previous - 181. Flower Piano

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Money

I believe I've already written about my curiosity as to where money for something like a government military acquisition -- like a ship -- goes. In the same vein I wonder what the wealth of the average billionaire is actually doing. When people talk against the One Percent the assumption seems to be that their wealth is in gold and jewels stashed under their beds. In reality, I imagine their wealth -- when it isn't tied down in the stock of a company they are associated with, or in land -- is actively doing the kinds of things one expects capital to do. Perhaps we would want to redirect it to different sectors of the economy, or to different charities, or to different politicians, but that capital is still out there actively creating jobs of one sort or another. (Now I'm pretty sure I have written about this before.) Even the money they spend on themselves goes from pocket to pocket.

People really should be protesting me. Aside from supporting (in a very modest way) a number of modest cafes and restaurants, I spend almost nothing in ways that put dollars in the pockets of clerks or plant workers or artisans or even repair-people.

As I imagine Ford Madox Ford's good Tory landowner, one of his primary roles is to be the chief consumer of his neighborhood. Consuming the fruits of his tenants labor (or labour). Of course this is a role that Christian Tiejens shirked. Voltaire may have been much better in this regard. Also Vronsky. And do we want to be dependent on the occasional good seigneur? Especially when we know that the average landlord will see the benefit of clearing the land or in-closing the commons -- just as the average Clinton and Obama supporting landlord in SF sees the benefit of asking for the maximum rent the market will bear.

It just occurred to me that Sir Walter Eliot in Jane Austen's Persuasion could be the poster child for the economic quality I'm talking about. His inability to "retrench" would have been greatly beneficial to the common people around Kellynch Hall. We see him as vain and uncaring of others -- even when he is played by Tony Head (BtVS's Rupert Giles) -- but I imagine that, when they left for Bath, his purse was more missed in the neighborhood than was Anne's wisdom and good sense.

And now I'm wondering if any of the Annales School historians has studied the economic effect of the concentration of nobility in Versailles under Louis XIV? I'm guessing it was a sad time for the rest of France.

"Ballet of the good city sidewalk," with coughing 

This morning I had a very early doctor's appointment downtown -- so equal distance between my gym and the Bank Cafe (where I'm writing this. I even got one of the nice chairs in the window I'm so early). I woke an hour early and was walking to my appointment at the time when I usually wake up. My point being that I was seeing Bush Street at an unusual hour. 

This is the stretch of Bush I've written about before because it has so many French connections and because it is the haunt of the smoking gnome. I was only two hours earlier than normal, but the street felt so different I was reminded of Jane Jacobs's "ballet of the good city sidewalk" from The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

If I gave that woman a copy of the book, do you think I could get her to write her own description of the changes on Bush over the course of a day? No. But I love the idea. As perfect as Jacobs's Greenwich Village street was, this stretch of Bush may be even better. There are a number of small hotels and restaurants catering to tourists. There's the Tunnel Top bar and that nest of commerce by the Stockton tunnel that I've already written about -- including The Green Door Massage parlor

But there are also apartment buildings, the big parking garage, the church, the consulate, and the Goethe Institute. And of course the ebb and flow of commuter foot traffic that I've also written about before. 

Walking here to the Bank Cafe from the doctor's was like swimming against a salmon migration as I neared Market and the swarm of commuters exiting the train station there around 9am. And while 7am is early for me now, I know from my taxi days that the Financial District (and now the downtown part of SOMA as well) wakes up at 4:30am. Somewhere in there I'm sure there's a shift change with commuters (coffee cups in hand) starting to trickle in by car, bike, bus, train, and ferry while the "homeless" start to breakdown (some) of their camps and move into their begging positions.

YouTube

One of my favorite YouTube science presenters (?) is in the midst of a wonderful series of videos about Quantum Field Theory. (Here and Here and here and here .) I was promised a second video focused on Richard Feynman but there has been an annoying delay. (Here.)

My favorite Medium writer about science just did a wonderful piece on what's been learned about the universe (astrophysics, here) in the past hundred years. But it's almost like they are teasing me because what I want from both of these sources is more about Quantum Chromodynamics. 

It would seem to be the logical next step for the YouTube person, and perhaps the third step ahead for the Medium person. But I don't know if they see it the same way.

New book

Our latest book club title is My Name Is Lucy Barton. A novel by Elizabeth Strout. I'm enjoying it but there's nothing to write about so far. It's a refreshing change of pace, to be honest.

So, having said that I read a few more sections... The book, at least so far, is about how we are shaped by our childhoods; by how our parents managed their parental duties along with everything else in their lives. 

It's easiest to see this when the parents did an obviously bad job, leaving their kids with emotional injuries they often never recover from. But it's always worth being reminded that the parents who did a better job are also responsible for how their children turned out. At least to some extent. 

I'd say my parents did a great job up until I was about eight, and that may be the most character forming period. My mother always said I was born "this way" -- calm and reserved, I guess. Self-sufficient. Yet would I have stayed this way if I hadn't been so supported in those early years? No way to know.

Now, I remember the way my parents argued constantly, from the time I was eight or nine until I left home after high school, the way I remember that I had swine or avian flu several times in the 1950s and 1960s (that I hope will continue to give me some immunity in the future). I recall it but I don't dwell on it or remember the day to day anxiety unless I really think about it (like now.) The immunity I got from that experience has also stayed with me and shaped me in social ways. It's the main reason I can check off the "Single, never been married" option on some forms.

One of my online friends has had a life, but especially a childhood, that no one would believe if you recorded it in the form of a novel. She's more damaged but also more resilient than I am. 

Next - 183. Seeing the end