382. Cherry Blossom Festival 2022 & Time

      

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Time, again 

Day 745/290 - 4/1/2022 

I’m caught up with everything published in Bloggity. Which means that I now have to start posting again and really catch up. I also may get around to my chronological review of Pirenne’s book. Always worth the effort.

I’m really enjoying my “fetal” perspective on celebrating birthdays. The wisdom of age can be a wonderful thing. 

Day 757/302 - 4/13/2022  

I’m happily working in the Bank Cafe after a solid two days of working the first Cherry Blossom Festival since 2019. I was very cold the last day but otherwise working the event in my seventies was no different than from my sixties. I have added a new exercise to my daily routine to make it easier for me to climb into trucks. We will see how that goes.

The event itself was smaller than usual with fewer food vendors. Since this is also the warm up event for me -- the first greening work I do this season -- the lighter load was appreciated. And none of us will miss the parade that is not being held next Sunday. On the other hand, the person acting as the end-of-the-day crew chief now needs more help than the previous person did, so I have to work longer than I have in the past. From a half hour to a full hour on Saturday. Such is life when you work for a group that almost inevitably loses its best workers over time.

It was nice to work again with three of our other regulars. Two of us happened to approach the seme ecostation at the moment a festival goer was dumping her food related trash. She got it so wrong it would have been amazing if we hadn’t seen it so often. Our eyes met in acknowledgement of what we had both seen, but neither of us bothered to say anything, what’s the point? The great thing about wearing masks is that they hide our facial expressions for the most part. The eyes can still reveal a lot. Another one of us was trying to work with the food vendors to get them to sort their own trash properly. He couldn’t see my smile as he reported this. These particular vendors are among the worst we deal with and I’ve learned that the most you can hope for is that they bring you their mixed bags so that you can properly sort them. And that is my job.

There were lots of great dogs at the event and so many people now have chest or back carriers for their smaller dogs. It’s a pleasant surprise to be eye to eye with so many dogs as I pass through the crowd. And so many Akitas. I prefer the Pitties, but Akitas are more appropriate to the context.

I also noted that the little cafe on the SW corner of Sutter and Buchanan, where I used to eat breakfast on occasion back in the ‘70s was closed. There were posters in the windows wishing the owners a happy retirement. So little is left now from the SF businesses I knew back then. Of course that’s also true about the business I frequented in the ‘90s. 

Day 763/308 - 4/19/22

On Time - We will see how much this is a call-out to The Magic Mountain...

This month has been the first time since 2019 that I’ve worked both weekend days twice in a row. Physically I’m fine -- all my exercising paid off, in some ways my legs are stronger than before and I’ve added a new exercise to address the way they are not as strong as before -- but I feel like I’ve gotten behind on housekeeping and errands and like. Just this morning I had to remind myself that I’m semi-retired (and I live alone) so it really doesn’t matter. But I also found myself almost envying pandemic time of mid-2020 when I had nothing but time on my hands. Now I try to squeeze my fitness work into everything else whereas then I tried to spread out my workouts to give me more things to do. Rather than napping.

Hans’s situation was different in that he had staff to deal with what takes up most of my time: shopping for and preparing food, housekeeping. But his situation, once he eased into life on the mountain, was not unlike my semi-retired situation. This is what most incensed Settembrini. Aside from his “taking stock,” it didn’t much matter if he did a thing today or tomorrow or not until next week or next month. 

If I didn’t prefer to work here (the Bank Cafe, where it’s warm and expansive) rather than in my tiny ground floor garret, I would have almost pandemic time on my hands. This is like imagining how much money I could save by preparing all my own meals. Maybe later... if necessary. 

Cherry Blossom Festival update

The second weekend of CBF is now past. It was surprisingly busy. I did my usual thing with the vendors and had that situation under control early. Can’t say the same for the situation on the other street where we were still picking up piles of bags as my shift ended. I took advantage of my “senior” status to clock out and go home on time when the others were working overtime. While I did still have to get out my building’s trash -- remarkably contaminated for some reason -- the real reason I didn’t want to stay was that I think it’s absurd that they hadn’t done a better job of breaking that street down earlier. I’m sure this had something to do with all the idiot vendors, but I’m pretty sure most of those bags had been sitting out there for hours. 

Anyway, my part of the event went well and I’m all ready for a near normal season of waste diversion.

365. Some Do Not... - Part Two cont.

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Part Two

III. 

This may be my favorite section of the book, where we meet Mark and Mark, for all intents and purposes, meets Christopher.

I had forgotten one of the more brilliant instances of Christopher’s doomed luck. If his becoming the “mascot” of the Wannop family started rumors all over his world, you would have thought it would at least would have gained him credit with his father... wrong. Not only was his father put out at no longer being called on for help and advice, but we also learn, thanks to the omniscient narrator, that his father had thought of marrying Valentine himself.

P202 [Mark] “You had a cheque dishonored at the club this morning?”

Christopher said:
“Yes.”
Mark waited for explanations. Christopher was pleased at the speed with which the news had traveled: it confirmed what he had said to Port Scatho...

Mark was troubled. Used as he had been for thirty years to the vociferous south he had forgotten that there were taciturnities still... he had got into the habit of considering himself almost the only laconic being in the world. He suddenly remembered with discomfort -- but also with satisfaction -- that his brother was his brother.
...

P214 Christopher said [to Mark]:
“I doubt if liar is the right word. He [Ruggles] picked up things that were said against me. No doubt he reported them faithfully enough. Things are said against me, I don’t know why.”

“Because,” Mark said with emphasis, “you treat these south country swine with the contempt that they deserve. They’re incapable of understanding the motives of a gentleman. If you live among dogs they’ll think you have the motives of a dog. What other motives can they give you?” He added: “I thought you’d been buried so long under their muck that you were as mucky as they!”

P215 Tietjens looked at his brother with the respect one has to give to a man ignorant but shrewd. It was a discovery that his brother was shrewd. [Presumably this “Tietjens” is Christopher]

P216 ... Mark said. “You’ve got Groby to all intents and purposes...”

Christopher said:
“Thanks. I don’t want it.”
“Got your knife into me?” Mark asked.
“Yes. I’ve got my knife into you,” Christopher answered. “Into the whole bloody lot of you, and Ruggles’ and ffolliott’s and our father!”

Mark said: “Ah!”
“You don’t suppose I wouldn’t have?” Christopher asked.

“Oh, I don’t suppose you wouldn’t have,” Mark answered. “I thought you were a soft sort of bloke. I see you aren’t.”

“I’m as North Riding as yourself!” Christopher answered.
...

P220 “No. I’m coming in,” Mark said. “I want to speak with Hogarth... About the transport wagon parks in Regent park. I manage all those beastly things and a lot more.”

“They say you do it damn well,” Christopher said. “They say you’re indispensable.” He was aware that his brother desired to stay with him as long as possible. He desired it himself.
...

[They meet Valentine]
P221 ... He added: “This is my brother Mark.”

...she said to Mark:
“I didn’t know Mr Tietjens had a brother. Or hardly. I’ve never heard him speak of you.”

Mark grinned feebly, exhibiting to the lady the brilliant lining of his hat.

“I don’t suppose anyone has ever heard me speak of him,” he said, “but he’s my brother all right!”

[Valentine asks Christopher if he’s “Mrs Macmasters that is’s” lover because Sylvia told her this. Christopher sets her straight]

P223 Christopher said:
“Come along. I’ve been answering tomfool questions all day. I’ve got another tomfool to see here, then I’m through.”

She said:
“I can’t come with you, crying like this.”
He answered:
“Oh, yes you can. This is the place where women cry.” [Where casualties are posted.] He added: “Besides there’s Mark. He’s a comforting ass.”
He delivered her over to Mark.
“Here look after Miss Wannop,” he said. “You want to talk to her anyhow, don’t you?” and he hurried ahead of them....

IV

This is such a Ford Madox Ford section. There are about three pages of Mark talking with Valentine and telling her his father “wanted your mother to be comfortable... He wants you to be comfortable too. . . .” and so solving their pressing financial situation that has been causing Valentine so much stress. Then we are in Valentine’s head for thirty-two pages recalling everything from the start of the war to her recent break with Mrs Macmaster.

V

And we are still in Valentine’s head. We are now brought up to the present including the phone conversation between Sylvia and Valentine at the beginning of this Part that we didn’t quite hear. The one where Sylvia tells Valentine, “Young woman! You’d better keep off the grass.  Mrs Duchemin is already my husband’s mistress. You keep off.” It is interesting that everyone believes all the rumors about Christopher. When he is in their presence people seem to believe he’s pure as the driven snow but he’s instantly pure as the driven slush when there’s gossip.

From page 229 to page 277 it's all in Valentine's head before we finally return to where Valentine is still sitting with Mark waiting for Christopher. And now for the love scene. Ready?

P 279 ...He had led her past swans -- or possibly huts; she never remembered which -- to a seat that had over it, or near it, a weeping willow. He had said, gasping, too, like a fish:

“Will you be my mistress to-night? I am going out to-morrow at 8.30 from Waterloo.”

P280 She had answered:
“Yes! Be at such and such a studio just before twelve. . . . I have to see my brother home. . . . He will be drunk. . . .” She meant to say: “Oh my darling, I have wanted you so much. . . .”
She said instead:
“I have arranged the cushions. . . .”


90 days of pandemic social distancing

The bees have gotten about all they’re going to get out of the flowering bush outside my window. That pretty much signals the start of summer for me. The next change I see will be when the maple tree turns color in the fall. I don’t expect all that much will have changed by then. I will still be social distancing and sheltering in place for the most part. It’s going to be the strangest year of my life.

Excepting errands around the building, like doing my laundry, watering the plants, sweeping and the like, I usually only leave my apartment once a day for exercise or twice if I have to go to the market or a restaurant for takeaway. Next week I’ll be venturing all the way to the bank, which I seem to need to hit once a month.

What I miss most, (not including food) and what I fantasize about attempting if it does reopen this year, is the bank cafe. I have still not had a drop of iced tea (or alcohol) this whole time. I would so like to grab my usual iced tea -- even if it has to be in a disposable cup -- and find an isolated spot to work on some project for several hours. It is a big place with good HVAC, so this doesn’t seem impossible to me.

I can’t imagine returning to the gym. Some of my usual restaurants/cafes I probably could try again, but the calculus of risk might not be worth it. We are probably weeks away from this even being an option and if the cases and deaths continue to rise, as is likely, I may not even be able to consider this by then. 

I do keep thinking of The Magic Mountain -- which should surprise no one who has read any of my blogs. The quality of time under lockdown. The importance of food and exercise and routine and the variation of that routine. All these things from the book are now daily considerations for me. Hans had the advantage in every way. He was really only restricted to his little Alpine valley. I’m limited to my hill, but even on my hill and in my building my actions are limited. And Hans only had to wear a mask for Fasching. I have a variety of masks for different activities outside my apartment, and have been attempting -- still without any luck -- to obtain better masks for several months now.

What I most envy Hans Castorp: His five prepared meals a day. His terrace with a view of the valley. His social life, including dueling mentors. On-site health professionals. If this goes on for over a year I may need to change the order of some of these items.

VI

And another prime example of how Ford chooses to tell a story. For the tale of how Christopher spent his last evening in London before returning to France and the Great War, we start... with him returning home at half-past three in the morning and falling into a chair in the dark,

P280 ...He imagined that no man had ever been so tired and that no man had ever been so alone!...

Their night of passion has come to this,

P281 “...Our hands didn’t meet. . . . I don’t believe I’ve shaken hands. . . . I don’t believe I’ve touched the girl . . . in my life. . . . Never once!... English, you know . . . But yes, she put her arm over my shoulders. . . . On the bank! . . . On such short acquaintance! I said to myself then . . . Well, we’ve made up for it since then. Or no! Not made up! . . . Atoned. . . . As Sylvia so aptly put it; at that moment mother was dying. . . .”

When they finally get her drunk brother home he passes out on the sofa -- where she had arranged the cushions.

P283 ...He had exclaimed:
“It’s perhaps too . . . untidy . . .”
She had said:
“Yes! Yes . . . Ugly . . . Too . . . oh . . . private!”
...

...he had added: “We’re the sort that . . . do not!”
She had answered, quickly too:
“Yes -- that’s it. We’re that sort!”...

And then they are off to talk about the party at Macmaster’s that Valentine didn’t attend as she has broken with Mrs Macmaster. Where Christopher learns that Macmaster has gotten a knighthood for a bit of statistics work Christopher had done as a joke showing that the French had suffered hardly at all if you just counted the bricks destroyed and not the output of the farms, mines, and factories occupied since the war began. This marks the end of his relationship with Macmaster as they can not really stand having him around as they can’t pay back all the money Christopher loaned Macmaster to get him established. That and the fact that Mrs Duchemin that was has always hated him.

And with that whimper, we end the first volume of Parade’s End.

329. The Dark Flood Rises

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The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

Didn’t expect this to be so philosophical. Also, the main character mentions a “land tax” which I interpret to mean a tax on rent -- aren’t there already property taxes in the UK?
P3 Land tax?

P5 I do like her use of the Premier Inns. I expected her to be critical but why not see such places as being shelters, places of respite, little bits of heaven. Even if this is represented primarily by the properly cooked soft-boiled egg. There is something wonderfully tactile and sensuous about this ordinary detail. I can translate it into the perfect scrambled eggs my grandmother made -- if I found those at a hotel chain I would make an effort to frequent the places. And I’m reminded of the fictional kitchen at the Hotel Paradise and even of Melrose Plant’s club in London.

P9 A person on regional TV,  “To tell you the truth,” says this robust young person, ‘I’m always hoping something really really terrible is about to happen, like the end of of the world, you know what I mean? And that I’ll be right there?...”

p10 Fran does know exactly what she means. She too has often thought it would be fun to be in at the end, and no blame attached. One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment. An asteroid could do it... She can’t understand the human race’s desire to perpetuate itself, to go on living at all costs... She is happy to see that this healthy and happy young person shares some of her metaphysical defiance. It is an exoneration.

One wouldn’t mind dying by cataclysm, but one doesn’t want to die young by mistake, or possibly by human error... Is is not much comfort to reflect that, like Antigone, Sara has escaped getting old by dying young...

How old is Fran? In her 70s but where in her 70s? P19 Is she just 70? (This is such a delicate calibration. I’m planning to continue my greening work until I’m 75, and I plan to re-paint my apartment then as well. It would be a drag to have to paint earlier than it’s strictly required. Especially since I just touched-up the place last year. As much as I want to see the new look I have planned, I don’t want to go through all that trouble before I have to.) 

I finally looked up the plot summary of Beckett’s “Happy Days” in SparkNotes. It is a good metaphor for ageing, slowly getting buried in deeper and deeper earth. Sadly, the summary includes this sentence, “Winnie sees that Willie is trying to crawl out of his whole.” I wish I thought this was trying to say something profound, rather than simply being a typo.

But this gets back to how old Fran is, I tend to think you don’t start getting buried until you are past 75, though I know that isn’t always true. But for an ordinary case, like Fran, I would think the burying would start closer to 80. And this relates to the mystery of people who fall and can’t get back up. I quizzed my physical therapist about this and she said the elderly are simply not used to being on the ground and once down, have no plan about getting back up. And obviously there must be a lack of strength as well. I’m on the floor every day and I’m not aware of getting up being a particular problem, except when my back is out. Then it does require a plan. But if this is the case, why aren’t the elderly simply required to get on the floor and then pull themselves up again everyday in training? And they, like me, could do some core exercises and maybe some hip stretches while they’re down there. Wouldn’t that be both sensible and easy?

P17 Drabble’s attitude toward drink seems to match Grimes’s. I wonder if she’s an alcoholic too? And there are many references to smoking as well... hmmm. Could someone write a dissertation on the correlation between characterization and chemical dependencies?

P20 For ageing is, says Fran to herself gamely... a fascinating journey into the unknown...”

Over breakfast, her good mood continues, indeed intensifies... she finds herself to be almost entirely happy. Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer? She has selfishly forgotten, for the moment, [her son] Christopher’s distress. As we age, yes it is true, it is true, we become more and more selfish. We live for our appetites. Or that’s one way of looking at ageing. Old people are very selfish, very greedy...”

P21 Her egg, when it arrives, is perfection. The yolk is soft, the white is firm...

Perfect, says Fran, with emphasis, Perfect, she repeats.

P22 Yes, perfection. She reads the headlines and the lead story, moves to the continuation of the story on page two. She feels a powerful surge of happiness, a sense that all is well with the world, that she is in the right place at the right time, for this moment in time. She has had a good night, comfortable, pain-free, in a big white premier bed. And now she is at one with these munching people, she enjoys their enjoyment, as she spoons her chaste and perfect egg. And she is at one, through her almost-reliable friend of a newspaper, with the miscellaneous events of the turning world.

And then there is the passage about robots. A robot floor cleaner makes sense, also robot furniture that would contain all your most needed things and bring them to you when needed. It would be simple enough to incorporate “steps” to pull yourself up or even a lift arm to pull you up if you fall. Plus a phone. It would be like a mobile steamer trunk. Or you could have a dirty clothes hamper that would, when full, insert itself into the washer/dryer. Though having it put your clothes away seems a bit challenging.

P28 The Way of the Bardo -- the liminal state between lives in Tibetan Buddhism. Or a similar state as of illness. TMM has something of the bardo about it. In Tibetan Buddhism you spend a year in Bardo, and that determines the character of your next life. I think Drabble here is thinking of old age as a similar intervening period. When you are neither here nor there. Neither really alive nor actually dead.

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage... A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. Old fools, who didn’t have the courage to have that last whisky and set the bedding on fire with a last cigarette.

And yet, in the novel, she shows us none of this. And there’s really very little about what life is like in Jo’s development besides her meetings with Owen. I imagine it is rather like Gideon Pond only posher and more academic. Drabble doesn’t give me any reason to believe she’s ever been in one of these places.

P35 [Claude] ...He discovered classical music as a teenager, and this daily programme is aimed at his level. He knows it can annoy seriously musical people but he is not seriously musical. Culturally, he has always enjoyed striking an unsettling pose between the philistine and the mandarin, and somehow Classic FM fails to annoy him at all... now he likes to feel part of the stay-at-home family of the housebound, the housewives, the retired, the unemployed, the home-workers, the put-your-feet-up-you’ve-earned-a-rest brigade. The presenters speak to him pleasantly...

P36 Claude even enjoys the Classic FM commercials, as they attempt to sell him car insurance and medical products and barbecues and tickets to concerts and homely holidays in dullish English counties. The travel news, with its accidents and lane closures and roadworks, is a comfort to him, for now he is not longer driving or being driven, he is safe in his day bed, not stuck in the stationary fast lane or stranded on the hard shoulder. All over Britain, people are having a bad time at the wheel. Classic FM makes him feel part of the human race, without having to pay a high price for his inclusion.

And there is more about his love of classical music. Interestingly, and in support of what is said above about “Classic FM,” everything he mentions -- composers and performers, is familiar to me even though I haven’t listened to much Classical music since the ‘80s. His taste is quite conventional. If he were a symphony goer he would probably skip the more daring pieces, or leave early, or drink more. 

Now this is something I wish Drabble had gone into a bit more because I assume, but would like confirmed, that a Classical music fan might find, late in life, his taste expanding to include pieces that were previously opaque to him. I know this is true for me with Jazz, something else that I don’t listen to as much as I once did, but where I find my taste has altered, to embrace Bill Evans, for example. Presumably there would be classical equivalents to this were I to resume attending symphony concerts. But not opera. Pretty sure I will never like opera.

Some of what is said about Classic FM above also applies to my listening to News AM in the mornings. Especially the traffic reports. For me there’s always been a pleasure in not having to care about the traffic problems. And yet I do love the idea of the multifaceted commute. The twice daily flow of people on boats, trains, buses, and cars all over the metro area, from Petaluma to Santa Rosa and beyond. The breathing of “The Giant,” as Robert Pirsig called the city.

I think Drabble enjoys getting into the minds and realities of these characters, and the drinking and sometimes smoking, is just an aspect of that. It is curious that she writes so little about their troubles. We get Fran’s anxiety -- and Teresa’s too, briefly -- but we don’t hear much about the little health concerns that most people have. I don’t think I’m out of the ordinary in usually having a couple “issues” I’m dealing with at any given time. They are always changing and none are very important, but they are on one’s mind. At times “medications” have been mentioned without any hint of what they are for. I might even ask my book club if they don’t usually have a primary and secondary health concern -- and this doesn’t include the big, obvious issues.

P37 I do like Fran’s improvement ideas. It still annoys me that I learned about lever style door openers right after I last had to replace several door knobs. I’ve already raised the idea of replacing all the front doors in my building with lever style hardware. 


P51 Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb... 2nd time we’ve gotten that. She is a bit dark. Though I was just making that point recently with the book club. TMM, of course, but possibly somewhere else. Is there really much of this sentiment in the characters?

P64 I want to read this book about the Canaries in Roman times. And I like this approach of having a character talk about a book no one is ever going to write.

P79 Drabble is getting more and more interesting. There’s an effortlessness to her shifts of perspective that I find impressive. She doesn’t even bother with chapter breaks, just shifts narrators from paragraph to paragraph as it suits her. I’m glad I started reading a little early in the month because we are getting information now that makes me want to go back and reread the first narrator. Perhaps because I’ve never read Drabble before, I wasn’t expecting this much from the “telling” of the story.

On re-reading this, I’m less impressed than I was. Her omniscient narrator became frustrating and then maddening as she seemed to be so uninterested in the story and characters. Godlike in the sense of not caring. What’s the name for a narrator that could tell you everything but chooses not to? See also p82-83.

P82 Better and better. Now we have an omniscient narrator telling us what our characters will and will not allow us to see of them.

P92 Gee, this is fun.

P100 It’s odd how Drabble sets Fran up with two interesting friends -- Jo and Teresa -- only to kill them both off. Granted, that is one of the worst aspects of old age, that important people in your life tend to die. Are we supposed to get something from their deaths? The deaths our omniscient narrator doesn’t bother to attend. I look forward to re-reading Teresa’s section to see if there’s something there that will explain her death. Jo’s was out of the blue. If our narrator had attended, perhaps we would see if Jo had indeed been eager for the tomb or relieved at it not being her fault. I’m suspicious of what people think they think about death. For that matter, I would like to see Drabbles notes on illness and death -- what exactly is she basing her fiction on? Is it the usual fictive creation or is it based on experience? Normally I wouldn’t care, but here I do care.

P104 Jo’s investigation of Alice Studdert Meade is terminated at her death. Sara’s work is continued to some extent by Christopher, but it is no longer her work. No one is likely to take up Bennett’s history of the Canary Islands. No, I’m wrong about that last as Christopher is, surprisingly, taking on that as well.

Philosophers have an unfair advantage here as death is the ultimate form of research for the areas of philosophy that matter most. It’s as if you popped out of existence when you read the last page of a book, even if you were just scanning ahead. It would be considered cheating, but you would have to respect the dedication of the person so eager for eschatological certainty.

But back to life-work, Claude is happy to not be doing what he was doing, Fran likes what she’s doing. Poppit and Christopher are too young, and it’s hard to say what exactly they’re doing. (Christopher and Ishmael have their little adventure of closure, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) Ivor is a caretaker, but how he adjusts to the loss of Bennett we don’t learn. I don’t see that Drabble really comes to terms with how people abandon their previous selves in old age. (Drabble is 13 years older than me, so 79.) And Jo is probably a good equivalent of her life, except she’s more successful and still publishing. For intellectuals, there doesn’t seem to be the same phenomena of leaving your working life behind when you “retire”. Teresa was the most “retired” person but that was because she was dying and so concerned with eschatology, again. Not the norm.

P109 Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life
Cuts off so many years of fearing death.

Reminds me of Nietzsche's the wisdom of Silenus.

P110 A reference to the Lisbon earthquake, again. Thank you Mann and Voltaire. You could do a novel about aging and dying and the places people choose to do these things with a modern Candide and Pangloss. It would practically write itself.

P111 After thinking how blameless humans would be in a disaster caused by the simple eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands, “Christopher dimly remembers from his college days that the Lisbon earthquake... was the cause of much anguished philosophical questioning at the time, from Christians, deists and unbelievers alike, seeking to justify the ways of God to man.

Maybe we are all seeking a neutral agency to wipe us out. An asteroid, a tsunami, a tidal wave.

Our longing for the tomb. 

“A Dialog of Self and Soul” by William Butler Yeats (see HERE) This reminds me a bit of the dialectic of the body and soul in TMM, and there’s also the longing for death there as well. Yeats’s poem is TMM in rhyme. So glad I didn’t suggest this book.

This death wish motif is certainly pervasive in this book. The Stubbs family really does seem to be together on this topic. I so wish we had had that conversation between Teresa and Fran about eschatology. Drabble is as cruel in this as Voltaire thought God was at Lisbon. With the possible exception of Teresa, Ivor is the only example of faith in the book -- and RC again. I haven’t been able to discover Drabbles background.

P126 Somehow Drabble reminds me of both Andrew Sean Greer and Martha Grimes at the same time. The characterization of Grimes and the careful plotting (I assume) of Greer. (Though not as much of the plotting as I was expecting. The foreshadowing about Fran's brakes started with the first paragraph but never paid off.) I think we are up to seven points-of-view so far. And now I’m looking forward to not just meeting some more characters, as would be the case with Grimes, but also getting inside their heads. I wonder if there will be a character whose perspective is not invaded. That would be interesting, too.

We’ve just covered Jo’s poetry class for elderly students. And we didn’t get into all of their heads, but that’s not what I was suggesting above. I have the feeling Drabble is stringing together a list of things she’s curious about and just dipping into them briefly in the minds of her characters -- the history of the Canaries in Roman times being my favorite example of this. But there’s also the Dead Wives Sisters idea. There’s really so much here that isn’t about ageing and dying. 

But there’s still more than enough of ageing and dying. We’ve been in Fran’s head, but I don’t think that has given us any real insight (yet) into why she chooses to live in the problematic tower -- though it could just be because of the Tennyson reference. And we have no idea what’s wrong with Claude. Whatever it is it is a handy literary illness in that it restricts him without seeming to make him feel sick, so far as we can see. Everyone in the book seems to be quite well. Bennett’s is the point-of-view we haven’t experienced yet. I should remember to bring my copy of A Death in Zamora to the meeting, thinking of the Spanish Civil War.

P128 Drabble uses Maria Callas’s late life story well. This is what happens when you outlive your own life -- looking at each day as one day less to live. Though I’m not sure if this is really the soul’s or the self’s perspective. I rather think it’s more the self regretting the loss of its better days but not forsaking the ways of the flesh for the rest of the soul in the tomb. Does anyone in this novel represent the soul? Drabble lets Yeats and Lawrence do her intellectual heavy lifting but I’m not seeing how her fiction really supports their work. Does she mean to tell a different story in contradiction? Or, like her disengaged narrator, does she simply not care?

P129 Claude does not think about his own approaching death in this dramatic manner [as Callas did]. He is stoic and calm and philosophical and has made himself as comfortable as possible. But he is glad that Callas was able to project all this terminal passion and grief for him, in her last bitterness as well as in her triumphant prime. She had acted the glory. She was the very body of the glory. He doesn’t have to go through all that. That’s what opera is for, that’s what art is for. It spares us the effort. It shows forth what we don’t have to go through.

And Claude is one of the more active of these quiet, English characters. No one is exactly raging against the dying of the light here. Reminds me of my own objections to Buddhism -- my fondness for Radha and Krishna while carefully avoiding the reality of Radha and Krishna. We celebrate the flesh with a good book and a perfect soft-boiled egg. Though I suppose you could see Dionysus in all that whisky and wine, but I’m having trouble with that as well. The one time someone in the novel thinks he’s had too much to drink it turns out to just be an earthquake. 

P132 The passage about the odd Jax and the equally odd young Poppet is interesting. I wonder when, if ever, we will be able to look at this more honestly?

P133 Claude... can still remember the disappointment of the hamper. [A gift from Jax following his successful surgery] It had looked so promising, but its wicker and red satin treasure chest had been loaded with small tins and jars of pate and confiture, with relish and bonbons, with small hard smoked cheeses and biscuits, and rather a lot of fake synthetic straw.

Makes for a nice symbol for “the good life,” what all the cool kids seem to long for. Isn’t that what we enjoyed about watching that program showing Ozzy Osbourne’s family? How much it was all like a disappointing gift hamper?

We go from Claude to Christopher who finds himself enjoying his visit to the Canaries. Even though he should be in mourning. He is not Maria Callas. Life calls to him in many of the ways life calls to the flesh -- though not sexually, as far as our narrator lets us know. Christopher was not deeply in love with Sara, so he doesn’t experience the soul-death of losing his soul mate. And yet, I can imagine other women, and not cold and distant women, going on and being revived by life. Though in Callas’s case, it may have been the loss of her career that was fatal.

P141 Poppit does not care much for the present, but she cares about the future of the planet and its inhabitants. She has transferred her allegiance to a vanishingly distant point. She has what some of her friends... consider an almost mystic capacity to personalize the planet and dehumanise her own concerns. Maybe, they think, she has no concerns? She does not seem very concerned about any of her friends... Cold though she is, she is also compelling. She is worth one’s while.
...

P142 ...She has reduced her way of life to what she considers and elegant minimalistic routine... She knows people who are out there, on the front line. She is the eye that watches them.
...
P143 She is fond of her little house, and of the surrounding water meadows and eel-rich waterways... She feels close to nature, in her solitary little dwelling on the canal, with the sky and the water, and the sky reflected in the water...

Fran has brought up that Poppet is living alone in housing that would have previously housed a family.

...This line of reproach didn’t quite reach Poppit, who was adroit at explaining why damp and lonely canalside cottage in a flood plain would be deeply undesirable to any local families.

P144 She is a casuist. Most statisticians are.
...

Poppit’s life is in the past. This is why she seems so old, for she is living a lengthy and extended afterlife. The most important events of her life happened before she was twenty-three and she lives in their wake. She has endeavoured to make that wake a placid level pathway. The brimming of the still canal mirrors it.

We don’t know what happened to Poppet in that most important and most disastrous relationship. Maybe one day she will tell us... Maybe Claude and his dusky paramour Persephone will be the first to hear an account of her disastrous, scarifying and destructive passion.

Not in this book. But I do note here that the narrator isn’t completely omniscient after all. My mistake.

P164, Past halfway and she’s still adding new characters. This time a childhood friend of Fran’s who is dying -- and not pleasantly -- from Mesothelioma. The detail of Mesothelioma seems to have been chosen for the aspect of cause and effect. Is it really true that a single fiber can kill? You would think we would all be dead if that were true. A quick online search throws doubt on this notion. For one thing, exposure alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient. You need to be genetically susceptible to responding in the wrong way to exposure. HIV might have been a better option, though of course that is fraught with other associations. 

The idea that a good Catholic would simply blame God and no one else, is interesting but, again, I don’t see much evidence for it. Still, I do think it is a good way to think. This goes back to my, this is your story now, theory of reacting to whatever life hands you. And this is related to the feeling expressed earlier (by who?) that an end of the world type event takes the pressure off everyone and is thus desirable. Christopher’s reflection on the earthquake/eruption/tidal wave possibility (that Poppit has just revived). 

And this goes well with my desire for a condition that is past treatment so you don’t have to even consider the “dance of death” options. And maybe there’s just a hint of Hans Castorp’s infatuation with living a passive life -- of dropping the protestant work ethic. And, I suppose, Fran represents that work ethic here. She continues to roam Britain doing good work instead of “enjoying” her “Golden Years.” (Me, too.) It wouldn’t surprise me if I need to read this twice.

P166 So Claude really is the representative, in this group, of “the flesh,” or “the self,” even though he is currently sidelined to his daybed. I’m not sure why I like that he has no real idea where Poppit is living. Even while retired and dying -- of what? -- he continues to be a useful source of medical information for Christopher later in the book. It would be better, I think, if his information had been useless or outdated. Or if he had simply been unable to attend. That is the aspect of aging this book doesn’t deal with. Even the demented aunt is presentable and entertaining in her own way. Teresa, with her history of dealing with special needs children, could have been the best means to delve into this if there were any special needs elderly people around.

P213 Something happened! And again in the Canaries. So at the moment we are interested in Christopher who is back in the Canaries visiting his new friends after the recent death of his GF. And we are interested in his mother, Fran, who is having a rainy adventure in the neighborhood of her daughter, Poppit, who is as yet uninvolved in the adventure. Then there are foci of interest in London involving Christopher’s father who is dying in style; and in Cambridge involving his “Aunt” Jo and another friend of the Canary couple. And there’s a residual focus from Fran’s first trip involving an elderly lady and the caregiver in the complex where she lives. I think that’s everything. I forgot Fran’s childhood chum in London.

P214 ...Fran is proud of her perceptions. She still enjoys perceiving. When she ceases to enjoy perceiving, she’ll know she is about to be dead. [Reminded of the end of Goethe's Faust.]

P227 Fran feels a great tearfulness rising up in her, a grief for all things, a grief for her daughter and thence, from that grief, a grief for all things. She had feared that she would outlive such grief, that her heart would grow thin and cold... She had thought that ageing would bring calm and indifference and impersonality. She knew it was unlikely to bring her peace of mind, as perhaps it had brought Teresa Quinn, who was practiced in an expectation of peace... she is, it would seem, condemned to grief, to an ever-replenishing well of grief, rising up from the centre of the earth of her body.
...

Her body has dried up, but not yet her tears. She lets them flow.

Perhaps Fran is the Maria Callas of this book. The one who feels for the others.

P236 Now, surprisingly, we are in Teresa’s head. Just when I had decided this was a book about the Stubbs it goes somewhere else. But then this is appropriate for an English novel as Teresa is RC. You can’t have English literature, apparently, without at least a touch of RC. And this gives us a chance to go to a religious place -- Teresa calls Fran a fair-weather pantheist -- which is a term I like a lot. And then there’s this,

Teresa has enjoyed discussing the last things with Fran, who, though an expert in trivia, is more than willing to apply her mind to eschatology. Teresa lies on her day bed... contemplating the new (to her) discovery that both pain and trivia can be a welcome distraction from the ultimately serious business of dying. Pain alters perceptions of time, and makes one wish to be elsewhere, to be speeding on one’s journey, whereas trivia comfortably and companionably block the forefront of the mind, occupying the space that might otherwise be devoted to prayer or thought or meditation or despair.

Trivia: a comfortable blanket, a mug of soup, a text message or two, a radio quiz, a book upon one’s lap.

Trivia: the meeting of the three ways, the lower arts.

And TV would be one of those lower arts. The distractions, so that one doesn’t think about the things it would seem one ought to be thinking about... says the student of philosophy.

P237 [D.H.] Lawrence had been dying when he visited Tarquinia and Cerveteri and Volterra. He had died so young, and he had so much hated to be dying. He’d been bravely building his ship of death for the dark flood, and fitting it out with food and little cakes and wine and cooking pans, but he hadn’t wanted to die. She is too old to die young, and that’s a comfort. She often counts, on her fingers, her remaining comforts.”

P238 ...Sometimes she feels terminally weary, and wishes, in a cowardly manner, that she might die in her sleep, without having to look her God or her faith or her oncologist in the eye.

P239 ... It’s not clear to her what she’s supposed to do, on a spiritual level, with the rest of the time she has left. She’s never much liked the language of struggle and battle, and anyway, she knows the battle is already lost. She hasn’t thought of her relationship with her cancer in terms of fighting the good fight, as some do. But the lines from Timothy come back to her, nevertheless: Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called . . .

Lay hold on eternal life. Fight the good fight of faith.

She can’t do it.

Whereunto thou art also called.

She has known some who have lost their faith late in life, in their sixties, in their seventies, even in their eighties. Because the human story is so very disappointing, because the cruelty of it is so very great, and God’s care of his creation so hard to interpret.

P242 [About “the Catholic novelist Graham Greene] He didn’t like being called a Catholic novelist. He said he was a novelist who happened to be a Catholic. Teresa thinks that was casuistry.

P243 Her fretfulness and self-pity fade, and she feels herself rising up, into a higher and better place. She closes her eyes again, and is borne upwards, as she begins to doze and dream and sleep. She is released upward into dreaming, as the nagging little thorns of memory and anxiety and fear and rationality unhook themselves from the old heavy matted stuff of her consciousness, and allow her to rise from her body. She is released into the presence of a dream landscape: she is observing (but is not quite inhabiting) a scene with a foreground of a grassy hollow with olive trees and great tawny slabs of broken, antique stone. In the centre of the scene, the huge deep-rooted trunk of an ancient tree bears upwards in its forked branches a slab of stone like a sarcophagus. Far away, in the background, upon the distant hillside, far beyond and behind, in a higher country, stands a little white chapel. The place is known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar.

When she wakes, she will recognize in this dream landscape an allusion to the Etruscan tombs, and to the saving of the virtuous heathen from antiquity, and to a hand-coloured print given to her one year for Christmas by grateful parents...

A heavy stone coffin, a flesh-eating sarcophagus, borne upwards in the living growing branches of a tree.

Her dream had married Jerusalem and Athens. She is pleased with the inventiveness of her dream life.

Just a hint of “Snow” here. I do love the way Drabble writes about dream.

P248 How can Jo not know what or where the “Peak District” is? Shocked. I think this was as a child.

P272 Drabble slipped in a little three paragraph section from the point-of-view of an actress mentioned because Fran and Jo went to see her in "Happy Days." This works because she is plotting to kill herself at the end of the play’s run. The third paragraph is just the sentence, “Poor old Winnie. Oh Happy Days.”

P278 “Fran is worried about almost everybody and almost everything...

She’s had a text from Paul telling her that his Auntie Dorothy has died... ...the apparent meaninglessness of Dorothy’s later life is worryingly incomprehensible to Fran, and the force of it revisits her. It begs some big metaphysical questions that she cannot even formulate, let alone answer. Dorothy had been so outgoing, so engaging, so beautifully turned out, and yet so disconnected. [Drabble/Fran is misusing “beg the question” just like everyone else here]

She’d have liked to have discussed these aspects of Dorothy’s life and death with Teresa, who had taken a keen interest in the story of Fran’s encounter with Dorothy and the energetic and vibrantly coloured Suzette, but Teresa has abruptly and in few words cancelled or postponed their next meeting...

P280 [In the newspaper] There is a... photograph of a leafless tree in Yorkshire, with some brave and defiant words by the ageless David Hockney about the beauty of trees in winter.

But Fran needs the leaves.

She wishes she were back in the Premier Inn, in easy reach of the comfort of a perfect soft-boiled egg.

P282 I summon to the winding ancient stair . . . yet again, followed by a bit more about Beckett and Happy Days

P290 They are dropping like flies now. Reminds me of a Tolstoy serial novel. And now it’s my favorite character, Teresa, who has died. And off screen to boot. We are never present when the interesting things happen.


The end was very odd. We are given much more about the future of these characters than I was expecting but little of any real interest. It’s almost like the book was finished by someone who hadn’t read the book. Or only skimmed a summary. And Fran’s brakes never came into it at all despite all the foreshadowing, which is rather mean. And we are never present for any of the deaths. There’s something to be said for this approach, yet it is also disappointing.

311. Genji + Buddhism

Link to Table of Contents

Buddhism & Mann

For the past week, due to a friend’s traveling around India with a group of chanting Theravadic Buddhist monks and my resuming my reading of The Tale of Genji (now post Genji, see below) I’ve been thinking about Buddhism. And for me that means doing some reading and also conducting a series of thought experiments -- Buddhism didn’t do well, though no worse than other paternalistic religions. One thing I keep coming back to is a consideration of what makes a “great” person. The Buddhist I’m most familiar with is probably the Dalai Lama, so he would be an obvious candidate. And I do consider him to be a good man, but not really great. The names I kept coming back to were Richard Feynman and Michael, a friend who died several years ago now. It wasn’t until today that it occurred to me that my thinking here echoes The Magic Mountain. Feynman and Michael, in this context, have somewhat the same virtues as Pieter Peeperkorn. Whether my thinking has been shaped by Mann, or if my fondness for TMM is based on this similarity between us, I don’t know at this point.

While Peeperkorn, in TMM, mostly represents Dionysus or Bacchus, he also represents love for this world. For the simple pleasures, as the character might have said. Buddhism is not a friend of this world. Which means, drifting back to a previous train of thought, that neither Western Philosophy nor Eastern Religion is particularly interested in what is the best way to live in this world. Any value system based on (can’t find the term for things based on salvation that I keep running into lately) can only be accidentally useful in this world.

In Genji, besides all the praying, the only indication I see of a Buddhist mindset is the desire expressed by almost all of the characters at some point to retreat from life and devote themselves to religion. While many characters do this, and while Genji is talking about it for most of the book, he never does -- in the chapters we have -- and for good reasons, like needing to take care of all his ladies and their children. Buddhism, in Genji seems to be exclusively concerned with Eschatology. Which, in some ways, I have no problem with. This seems to me the thing religion should focus on even if it is just a placebo. But this leaves us with no guide for the best way to live our actual lives. And with unsatisfying “models” in the form of religious people like the Buddha.

Of course this is tricky, as establishing a value system independent of religion is as silly as establishing a physics independent of any meta-physics. You either have to come up with a religion that affirms this world, or you need to preface your value system with a declaration that religions are nothing but people telling each other nice stories. And good luck with that.

Genji

The Shining Genji is dead. We don’t know how or when, exactly. His death is simply announced at the start of a chapter, following the chapter that was all about his mourning for Murasaki. So what is this new chapter about, why the careers of the next generation: Niou (the son of Genji’s daughter by the Akashi lady) and Kaoru (Genji’s son who is actually Kashiwagi’s son.) 

Kaoru somehow outdoes even the Shining Genji in one way, his person seems to interact with scents to make them stronger. This affects anything, like flowers, he passes and has the women reeling. 

I’m not clear on the significance of perfume and scents in Japanese culture at this time. One of Genji’s chief charms was the perfumes he wore, but in the case of Kaoru, he seems to be a sort of perfume all by himself. I wonder if anyone has written a dissertation on this subject, and if it’s been translated into English? “The Importance of Scent in the Tale of Genji.”

Just as the ex-Emperor came to discover that Genji was his real father, Kaoru suspects there’s something about his paternity he doesn’t know. There are at least two women who could explain this to him -- his mother being the most obvious -- but that seems not to be an option. His half-”brother” Yugiri also has suspicions about this, but I’m not clear how this has come to be widely known. 

Free Falling

I was just listening to the Sid & Susie cover of Tom Petty’s Free Falling and started thinking how my life would have been different if we had stayed in the San Fernando Valley... or Boulder, or Louisville. I wasn’t a big fan of any of my family’s moves aside from the one to Boulder -- and if I had known the consequences of that I probably wouldn’t have liked that one either. Still, I can’t imagine myself minus the experiences I associate with the three places we moved to. Even Scottsdale.


Yet it’s still curious to think who those other mes would have been. I envy the me who spent the rest of his childhood in Boulder. I pity the me stuck in the Valley smog for four to eight more years. The Louisville me is the hardest to imagine.

302. “The ‘50s never die.”

The Impossible Burger at Mel's

I have read, with mild interest, about the search for a better veggie hamburger substitute. As with most things this trendy, much of this development is taking place locally. While I think the effort (time and money) could probably be better spent. And while I would be more interested if it was the search for a better BBQ ribs replacement. I wouldn’t object to a veggie burger that tasted more like the burgers of my youth. One of the candidates, in this competition is the “Impossible Burger” which I just ate at Mel’s Kitchen.

Mel’s is a famous local diner chain, it was featured in the movie "American Graffiti" -- still the best film George Lucas has made, in my opinion. One of their locations here, on Van Ness, has undergone an upscale transformation at the request of their landlord, a hotel also undergoing an upscale transformation. Instead of being a “diner” it is now a “kitchen.” There are still photos on the walls of "American Graffiti" and of the ‘50s in general, and there are some at-table jukebox controllers scattered about, but the actual music being played is not of the period. This would seem to be the decorative equivalent of façadism. But, then again, ‘50s music is problematic, so I’m not really complaining.

At any rate, I read in the paper that they were offering the Impossible Burger, so I took advantage of the opportunity to try one. It certainly isn’t the worst veggie burger I’ve ever ordered, though it’s close to the most expensive at $16. Without fries! Surprisingly, I would describe it as having the consistency of an uncooked hamburger patty. It tastes fine, but it does make me wonder what exactly they were aiming at. It is served at Mel’s with sliced pickles, a pesto sauce, and the usual lettuce and tomato. The bun was good but didn’t really add much to the experience.

While eating, I was thinking back on the outstanding burgers of my youth, starting in the ‘50s with White Castle. There the thing you recall is the bun, not the patty. My early ‘60s favorite was from Harvey’s on Colfax in Denver. There the primary taste ingredient was the secret sauce. I don’t recall much about either the bun or the patty. My final, late ‘60s favorite was from Whataburger, and I can’t recall anything specific about that one. So, at least for me, the bun and the sauce was more important than the actual burger patty. If I were interested in this search for the perfect veggie burger, I would ignore the patty entirely -- well, I’ve had Garden Burgers that were seasoned and tasted much better, so I would look into that. But I would just play with the bun and sauce and other toppings. A little avocado tends to make everything a little better. And even then, the only reason to even include the patty is to add some protein to the delicious mix. A “patty” of baked or sauteed tofu would work just as well if it had all the rest going for it.

Grease: Sundown Cinema

Last Friday I had to fill in for someone at the last minute. This was for a small event in our other big city park, McLaren Park. This was the first time I've been on foot in that park, but it was quite nice. This was for a public showing of the movie "Grease" -- which I realized I had never seen. There were only a few hundred people in attendance, probably because the weather has been cold and overcast, though it was surprisingly pleasant that evening. There were several food and drink vendors and a large security force, for some reason. The sing-along and dance-along aspect of the event would probably have worked better with a larger crowd.

I only caught a few scenes from the film, not my cup of tea. What I did like was the mostly ‘50s music that preceded the film. The DJ was a young woman with a box of LPs. She did a great job selecting music to play, there was very little I knew, but everything sounded of the period. If I had a tape of what she played, I would listen to it again. Which is a surprise considering my normal aversion to music from that decade.

The event was pretty boring for us as there was hardly any trash to sort. We were all done by 10:30pm though we were scheduled to work longer.

TMM and STC and "enki"

I’m caught up with my TMM blogging, I’ve done what my book club is reading this month (I cleverly specified the end of "Snow," rather than the end of chapter 6, so that we will focus on the philosophical debate and not get sidetracked by poor Joachim. I think they are regretting letting me be the “guide” for this book). I need to go over what I’ve blogged again, but I’m quite happy with it. I’ve linked material from all three of my active blogs. Everything is tying together nicely. And it occurred to me the other day that this will almost certainly be my last reading of TMM. Fortunately, there are one or two other things I still need to read.

On my recent Staycation trip to exotic Emeryville, I picked up yet another stylistically stunning design magazine from the UK, “enki” by name. Since I’m not quite ready to jump back into Genji, I’ve been amusing myself with “enki.” Mostly I love the typefaces and the overall graphic style of the mag. There is at least one instance of a room painted entirely in a dark gray, so popular in UK magazines and so very tempting to me. I’ve pretty much decided to go with the bright white look when I next paint my place, but whenever I see a photo of a room like this I fall in lust again. I just don’t think it would work in such a small space. I don’t actually plan to paint for nine years, so I have time to change my mind a few thousand times.

The most interesting house in this (September 2018) issue of “enki” is a modernist houseboat in Haarlem. It checks all the boxes, sustainable, modernist, climate-change resistant. It looks better on the outside than on the inside, which is nothing special, but I don’t understand why houses like this aren’t everywhere. Or at least everywhere there’s flowing water. Too big for me, of course. And I still have yet to see a multi-family floating project. I hope the Netherlands leads the way with this as the USA almost certainly wont.

There’s been exciting local news about the STC, our new multi-billion dollar bus station. Someone noticed that two of the steel beams, that hold up the part of the structure where I was catching the NL bus to Oakland two weekends ago, are cracked. The entire facility has been shut down and the buses returned to the Temporary Terminal. The beams must have been right above my head as I waited to catch the bus. I can’t wait to see how they shore it up while inspecting and repairing/replacing the beams. Seems like you would need a temporary beam that runs the width of the building and out over the street below, and then three-story posts to hold that beam in place. But how would you maneuver such a beam into place? (Instead they've opened holes in the bus level deck so the support posts run directly down to the street.)

There’s already a huge amount of litigation concerning the nearby residential tower that is sinking and tilting, and now we will get another layer of litigation to determine who is responsible for this SNAFU. And we lose the use of our lovely new park until the structural part of this problem is resolved.