196. Days of ozone

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Today was our second straight hot day. After only having a couple single days where the temperature reached into the 80s F, it has now blasted past the 90s into the 100s. Yesterday it was 106 -- the highest recorded temperature in the city's history, and today it was 102. I would have guessed it was in the 90s. 

The air quality is bad enough that I finally opened a bottle of artificial tears I've been holding on to for a couple months. The heat is supposed to break tomorrow.

The Light of the World by Elizabeth Alexander

p94 What a joyous memoir. The book is sad but also such a delight to read. The author, a poet, includes a poem by another poet about the death of her husband, in the voice of the dying husband, which closes with these lines,

...and I saw with the most amazing
clarity
so that I had not eyes but
sight,
and, rising and turning,
through my skin,
there was all around not the
shapes of things
but oh, at last, the things
themselves.

From "the death of fred clifton" by Lucille Clifton

Since I don't read German I can't tell how close Kant may have gotten to expressing this in such lovely and evocative language. But I would be very surprised. Perhaps poets should be assigned to philosophers the way the blind get guide dogs. 

Alexander elaborates about the poem,

...as Fred Clifton moves closer to true knowing, as he sees with "the most amazing/clarity." Death itself is like a snake shedding its skin. Fred Clifton describes "rising and turning/through [his] skin." A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath.

Death comes with a gift in the poem; our loved ones tell us here that what we see with our eyes is different from what we know: "The things/themselves." "Oh, at last" is the moment of exaltation in the poem. Lamentation and exaltation are simultaneous here.

This is my 50% expectation that death is like waking up.

Postscript to South of the Slot

All the metrics for success are now middle class ones. If you aren't doing well enough in terms of income and home ownership to meet that standard you are defined as a failure. 

The urban renewal movement following WW2 (personified by Robert Moses in NY and Justin Herman here) set out to eliminate all pockets of non-middle class culture. Here, in the Western Addition, this took on a racial appearance as the neighborhood had become black during the war, after the Japanese were interned. But South of the Slot, the distinction was not racial but class. And the gentrification of that area is now being followed by the gentrification of the few remaining lower class neighborhoods on the southeast side of town, under cover of improving the housing stock and transportation options.

From what little I've read, this class extermination was even more obvious in the UK. "Progress" was defined so that it naturally required the elimination of an entire way of life.

Swimming In Creepy Waters

Another book title. (Suggested by K.)
I have no idea what this would be, perhaps the story of someone working in government during the Trump administration? Or the inside story of the Summer Olympics in Rio? 

Next time, "Semiotics for Dummies." (Also suggested by K.)

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.