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.
Curious
Felt a bit better today -- fever down -- and thought I could go out and get a sandwich to bring home without sounding too consumptive. (Success.) But as I was dressing to go out I thought to myself, "Last time I was this sick I ended up buying a condo." And that's when the penny dropped.
It is almost exactly 20 years from when I was sick that time -- to within a week or two. I felt worse then (didn't leave my apartment for about a week) but had no obvious symptoms like now -- cue wet cough. I still don't know what was wrong with me in 1997, but the condo had been my salvation. And then I pushed it back even farther...
The last time I had a chest cold like this must have been within a year or so of 1977, so 40 years ago. Maybe I should leave a note to myself to prepare for 2037. Though I'm not sure how.
When life gives you phlegm...
A friend revealed an unexpected childhood -- and resulting personality disorder -- which got me thinking about how that "nuclear family" idea works better than I had expected. My family was an "ideal" nuclear family -- a hydrogen atom. Technically speaking we were Deuterium: I would say Mother was the proton and Dad was the neutron, since present fathers are more optional than mothers.
Even in the post-quantum, post-Linus Pauling world, the model of Deuterium is pretty simple, though you do have to recall that uncertainty is always a factor. But the "shell" in which the electron (me) can be found couldn't be easier to determine.
But when you start adding other siblings the picture starts to grow complex, as is the case with heavier atoms. (We're going to have to drop the family aspect of the nucleus here, unfortunately, as I was thinking about Tritium if step-parents were involved, but that doesn't really work out electrodynamically. Sad, really.)
With Pauling, electron "shells" get very odd.
The shell of each additional electron/sibling is shaped by the increased distance from the protons/parents and by interference with the other siblings. And so someone can end up with Impostor Syndrome simply from the social factors controlling the family unit.
I know that one of the reasons I adore Jane Austen is the rich family life in many of her novels. As an only child, siblings are endlessly fascinating to me. Like having a pony. And then, over time, you collect so many stories of dysfunctional sibling relationships that you need Elizabeth and Jane to hold on to. Now I see people with affectionate relationships with siblings as the true wonders of life.
But I'm not through with Impostor Syndrome since, as everyone knows, why settle for one metaphor when you can squeeze in two. Here's the above-the-contents description from Wiki,
Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome) is a concept describing high-achieving individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a "fraud". The term was coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes.[1] Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be. Some studies suggest that impostor syndrome is particularly common among high-achieving women.[2]
Synesthesia (Goat, I hope no one turns this into a drinking game) deals with how some of us (at least) perceive the world differently through our senses, but is this difference in perception any less real than seeing sound or tasting words? If your familial context -- or just life in general -- has shaped you in such a way that you are unable to perceive, and enjoy, your own success, then that is a most profound distortion of the world.
And I couldn't help noting that Impostor Syndrome seems to be the opposite of Donald Trump's condition. So how many variations are there on this theme. How many people puzzle us because they suffer from a kind of emotional synesthesia that we can't comprehend, unless they tell us or someone writes a book about them?
Anyway. Something to ponder as my sinuses drain and my temperature returns to below normal.
No, I'm not done yet. The problem with the QED atomic view above is that it's still too simple to describe the complexity of family relationships. I have to suggest we go... to the QCD side. Let's say a family starts when two quarks get together. (Meaning of chroma and spin TBD.) Often the quarks, not confident in the Strong Force (new definition), conceive a gluon to increase their bond -- sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. In the later case you have a gluon shaped by both a Strong and Weak (remote or dead or unknown parent) force.
The evolving gluon can also be shaped by siblings and step-quarks. The presence of younger siblings, for instance, tends to turn the oldest into a semi-quark. Qualities and weaknesses of the quarks (again, represented by chroma and spin) effect different gluons differently based on gender (spin?) and birth order and other factors.
Sometimes the gluon grows to be a healthy quark, escapes the Strong force without rejecting the Weak force of extended family. Other times the gluon escapes too quickly, before it is fully matured, or else can never escape the Strong force at all.
I wish I could assign this to someone to flesh out. That must be the fun part of being a teacher.
Aftermath
All the people who wanted change (the Bernie Sanders enthusiasts) and who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Clinton (who was just as bad as the Republicans) are now upset. And all the liberal/progressive organizations are swarming like fund-raising flies.
Acts of God
The other day I was having lunch with a friend at BrainWash when a crazy person walked up and sat at one of the tables on the sidewalk (we were inside). After sitting there for a while, he got up, picked up his cafe table, and threw it into the near lane of the (busy) street. The table broke into pieces and he walked away down an alley, kicking things and making more noise.
Several of us retrieved the shards of the table which the bus-boy took inside. They now have one fewer table outside. No one called the cops since that would just be a waste of everyone's time.
Thinking about this today, it occurred to me that this guy was a bit like a dust-devil -- a common phenomena in Arizona where the heat, independent of any other weather event, causes small, tornado like winds that can do minor damage to cars or lawn furniture or the like. It's just something that happens and you can't do anything about it but clean up after.
Cantonese
This morning I was sitting waiting to get my blood drawn for tests and listening to the Cantonese being spoken around me. As I understand it, syllables have a different meaning depending on the pitch. This makes me think that Cantonese could be a great analogue for QED with the syllable being an electron and the pitch representing its energy state. I still have no idea how you would represent QCD with sound, though I'm sure it would sound interesting as quarks (for instance) have so many different qualities.
But what I was noticing this morning is that it must not be the absolute pitch but rather the relative pitch that determines the meaning. There was a woman with a particularly high (and annoying) voice and other people speaking in lower ranges.
Spacetime is relative, but, I think, in either QED or QCD energy states are absolute. But recalling what Oliver Sacks wrote about people with absolute pitch, it shouldn't be too hard for those people to create a code where words (or phrases) had a different meaning at different pitches. Now that would be a tough code to break, and you could use it over any phone line or even on radio or TV.
My Medium retirement plan
The delight of a steady supply of content. That sentence should be a sub-head but I don't usually do that so, there it is.
Today, once again, I spent the bulk of my afternoon in the Peet's on Market trying to catch up on my Medium backlog. So, nothing new, except that it occurred to me how great it was to read through so many pieces on so many subjects. I'm still months behind, and therefore out of sync, but couldn't help responding to some of the military articles. With the physics and astrophysics articles I could restrain myself, but I really wanted to chime in from time to time. There was just so much great content to consider.
At some point I'm going to have to stop doing my greening work. I'm feeling better than I did last year, and keeping in shape all year round will undoubtedly prolong my "career," but I'm already starting to deal with turning 65 next year and I have reason to believe that I won't be getting any younger.
It's very French (and very optimistic) to use le petite mort to mean orgasm and not sleep. For me the months between October and April are le petite retirement. I'm still doing my HOA work; I'm still keeping in shape for next summer; but I have to acknowledge that at some point in the future this is going to be my life.
Today I read about QCD, controversies concerning both dark energy and dark matter, plus several other topics, and I had lunch at Bun Mee where I savored my favorite crispy tofu Vietnamese sandwich. I can do this.
I need a sound designer
I'm frustrated by the QCD metaphors of color and direction (up and down). Surely there's a better way to express this. I'm thinking that both color and direction could be represented by sound (don't ask me how) in such a way that you could hear the changes in the quarks of a hadron as it went from being a proton to being a neutron and back. Each hadron would thus be expressed by the blending of three tones. You should even be able to hear atoms and even molecules -- a hadron orchestra. If this was done properly, you would even be able to hear protonation taking place as a proton migrated from one molecule to another. Though, again, don't ask me how.
If, as I believe is the case, protonation is an instance of quantum tunnelling, then the sound of that tunneling -- of the proton appearing at the extreme end of its wave form -- should also have a distinctive sound.
The music of electrons and their shells (QED music?) -- that I've speculated about before -- is simple in comparison. I happen to know some good sound designers, but I have no reason to think they are also interested in QCD so even asking about this seems terribly odd even to me. A pity.
The coming days
This weekend is the Art & Soul Festival in Oakland. I imagine I will arrive home late and very tired the next two nights. Maybe I will be dying to write about something or other, but more likely Bloggity will go silent until Monday.
