343. The Violet Hour plus

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1989

Making a bank deposit at an ATM just now I was reminded, to my surprise, that I’ve been banking with Wells Fargo for thirty years. Of all the notable things I recall about 1989, switching banks for the last time wasn’t one. While I don’t think as highly of Wells Fargo as I did even eleven years ago -- when they came out of that last banking crisis looking better than most everyone else -- I’ve stayed with them for the same reason I switched -- it’s easier than dealing with smaller banks that are always getting swallowed up or closing down. Also, they are one of the few local banks left.

Of course I’ve had an account with PG&E even longer, forty-three years, and I don’t trust them at all. It’s nice to be a monopoly. I buy my electricity from the city but still have to pay PG&E just as much money to deliver that electricity. 

MCU

I’ve been thinking again about the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how science and magic mix. Harry Potter and Thor are special by birth, the notion of nobility that is surprisingly popular in popular culture. But Marvel characters tend to be average people that something unusual has given special powers to. Superman, like Thor, was born to his power. Iron Man and Batman have power largely due to wealth (Green Arrow, too), but anyone can be bitten by a radioactive spider or get zapped by some strange energy force (Captain Marvel or the Flash or the Hulk). I would actually rather not read how these powers are supposed to work as the pseudo-science would just be painful. As much as I enjoyed the Captain Marvel film, the whole idea of her power is ridiculous. As with the TV show Eureka, I just pretend it’s supposed to be about magic. Magic isn’t supposed to make sense.

The Violet Hour by Katie Roiphe 

The Dial Press - 2016

The Prologue was excellent. I don’t know Roiphe but I like the way she writes.

Susan Sontag - 

This is really excellent. And necessary. Illness As Metaphor needs to confront this final chapter in Sontag’s life and that’s what Roiphe is doing. I have to confess that I keep thinking of Trump when she talks about Sontag’s self-myth. I completely sympathize with David, but when so many people are actively engaged in pretending that a fantasy is reality, you know something is really wrong. 

On page 51 now and I’m wondering if Sontag will ever admit that she was wrong and that death can be a friend. That is what Sontag’s “courage” and “love of life” has come down to, an almost pathetic fear of death. Not a good look for a philosophy student.

I missed noting the page, but this is after they return to NYC from Seattle. The word that is missing here is Penelope Liveley’s favorite word, solipsism. I’m not sure Sontag truly believes in a reality outside herself. I’ve always thought of solipsism as a problem for Epistemology but if you are a true solipsist, it must become a metaphysical concern. Without you there is nothing.

This is why you have to read a story to the end. I mean the story of a life. The story of the survivor, of the person who always beats death can, ultimately, have only one ending. Just as Napoleon’s story of endless war could have only one ending. I’m tempted to say that she got the death she deserved, but that sounds cruel. She got the death that was true to her nature. She could never come to terms with death. She saw death as the enemy. And that’s fine, better than Foucault, for example, but in the end she paid for this with more suffering than was necessary. Though, of course, suffering is a kind of living. 

Occurs to me that eschatology must have been for Sontag what gynecology is for me, something I think doesn’t apply. Also, Sontag’s “battle” with bone marrow transplant and what followed took about five months. I don’t think I would try this even if I was guaranteed 10 good years.


Freud - 

p80 I may be with Freud here. People forget that morphine doesn’t suit everyone. Just as Sontag would cling to life (and Annie would photograph anything) I don’t see the point of living if you are not able to think clearly. Also, I’ve not had to deal with much pain. My opinion is subject to revision.

Wow! The bit about Lun not coming near him. Now here’s an aspect of my belief in Dog that I hadn’t anticipated. Dogs do have the wisdom to go off and peacefully die. This also suggests the idea (from Pullman) that our death is always with us and the dog can see it. Or probably smell it. This book is so exceeding my expectations.

P85 Lou Andreas-Salomé, I don’t know why I’m surprised to find her here. Roiphe seems to be hostile to Freud’s Stoic attitude toward death.

P89 Okay, now I see what she’s doing. And I completely agree. It is one thing to say that we have nothing to fear from death as when it arrives, we shall be gone. It is another to seriously face the end of your self. (And this would be true even if your body would continue to live.)

(Princess) Marie Bonaparte is yet another interesting women in this story.

P90 “In taking on a personal physician, Freud entered into a personal relation with death. He was beginning what could almost be called a negotiation. He asked Schur to promise that when the time came he would help him die, which Schur did. He also asked Schur to promise to be completely honest, which he did as well.” Quite a deal.

P91 “...Freud took up what he called ‘the sweet habit of smoking’ when he was twenty-four... he... was soon smoking twenty cigars a day...” I am reminded of Hans Castorp. 

“... he wrote, ‘For six days now I have not smoked a single cigar, and it cannot be denied that I owe my well-being to this renunciation. But it is sad.’ ” 

P92 “...Life without cigars was unbearable, a misery. From very early on he linked smoking to his imaginative work, to his creative side. It seemed to him impossible to work, to concentrate, to envision without a cigar, almost, to live. Something vital, crucial, was tangled up with cigars, something akin to identity.”

P93 Schur: “ ‘I asked myself repeatedly whether I was entitled, or even obliged, to insist more strongly on the enforcement of abstinence... I could not, and in retrospect I realize that I should not regret this fact. It’s questionable in any event whether such an attempt would have been successful.’ ” I am reminded here that my own father could not stop smoking until getting his rib cage cracked open threw off his golf swing... and by then it was too late.

She covers how he saw his passionate smoking as being opposed to his otherwise “petit bourgeois correctness.” His identity as an intellectual. 

P94 “His smoking... is crucial to his biography, to understanding his life and times. Freud is interested in this other story, this story written out in smoke. He is not careful. He is not correct. He is not the punctual, controlled, financially responsible, bourgeois Freud. ‘The fellow is actually somewhat more complicated.’ There is the wildness of his passion for cigars: it is the fire, the fuel, the fruitfulness. Elsewhere he calls it his ‘sin,’ which is an interesting word choice for a man of science, a man so naturally disinclined toward religious frameworks. The word ‘sin” endows the habit with a glamour, a richness it might not otherwise have; it is his taboo, his vice, his irrationality, and as such it is crucial to him, it is animating.”

P95 ...”Smoking, he suggests, is a substitute for the sexual; it is the expression of the libido.”

P97 “In... ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’ which came out in 1920, Freud raised the possibility of a silent drive toward death, a secret desire for annihilation animating each of us. He wrote a line many analysts would resist, finding it too extreme, too sweeping, too unsettling: ‘The aim of all life is death.’ And in this strange, speculative work, he began to address the irrational draw toward death, the desire for it, the mysterious attraction of undoing oneself.” 

I need to refer here to other people interested in this at the time from my Foucault work. And of course Hans Castorp comes to mind again. Here is a quote from The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller, he is writing about Foucault’s time in California exploring “limit experiences” in the Gay bath houses of SF and knowingly exposing himself to AIDS.

p 34

Foucault’s work was drawing to an end; and his life... was ending in an ambiguous gesture, as if he had finally grasped the full significance, too late, of the fatal temptation he had first identified nearly ten years earlier, long before AIDS had become a tangible threat: “The Faustian pact, whose temptation has been instilled in us by the deployment of sexuality, is now as follows: to exchange life in its entirety for sex itself, for the truth and the sovereignty of sex. Sex is worth dying for.”

This ties in so well with what Freud wrote above about smoking and the libido. Neither man could resist their personal temptation.

And Freud’s self-image that required smoking is in a way similar to Sontag’s survivor self-image.


While talking about dreams,

P78 ...”In the depth of his dream,” writes Foucault, “what man encounters is his death, a death which in its most inauthentic form is but the brutal and bloody interruption of life, yet in its authentic form, is the fulfillment of his very existence.”

Foucault got some of his ideas about death from Georges Bataille and the Surrealists. But I’m not ready to work out if they were getting ideas from Freud or the other way round. Or if it was a Jungian thing and the ideas were just floating in the collective unconscious at the time.

P100 “He would write later, ‘Only the collaboration and the conflict between both primal drives, Eros and death drive, explain the colorful variety of life’s phenomena, never one of them alone.’ ” Again I can’t help thinking of Foucault.

“...He wrote... ‘What we are left with is that the organism wishes to die only in its own fashion.’ ”

P102 Bonaparte makes up the following response to her from Freud, “Fr: Why sad? That’s what life is. It is precisely the eternal transitoriness which makes life so beautiful.’ She was making this dialogue up... but he had often expressed this view -- in a short essay on Goethe, in his letters; it was a recurring theme in their conversation.”

P103 ...”So the work he is doing now is the work of dying: He is doctor and patient, subject and writer, analysand and analyst.

“Freud seems, at times, to be studying his own relation to life: the subtle and nuanced fraying of the connection... ‘The change taking place is perhaps not very conspicuous; everything is as interesting as it was before; neither are the qualities very different; but some kind of resonance is lacking.’ ”

P104 “When in 1904 Lou Andreas-Salome wrote a floridly sentimental poem about how she would like to live a thousand years, even if those years contained nothing but pain, Freud commented wryly, ‘One cold in the head would prevent me from having that wish.’ ” (Amen.)

P109 “Freud finishes the last page of the Balzac novel and closes the book. He is not working anymore. He is not reading. He says, ‘My dear Schur, you remember our first talk. You promised me then you would help me when I could no longer carry on. It is only torture now and it has no longer any sense.’ ...
...

“At first Anna says no, and then Anna says yes.

“Schur gives Freud a third of a gram of morphia. He drifts to sleep. Later, Schur administers more morphia when he becomes restless.

“A quiet falls over the house. Freud is quiet under the mosquito netting.

P110 “...he died in the manner he chose to die, at the time he wanted to die. He chose and controlled something most of us are not privileged to choose and control. He imagined for himself this death. It looked to others like he had fallen asleep... Anna wrote, ‘I believe there is nothing worse than to see the people nearest to one lose the very qualities for which one loves them. I was spared that with my father, who was himself to the last minute,’ ...

“‘We cannot observe our own death,’ Freud wrote so authoritatively, so convincingly, and all the while he was trying his best to do exactly that.”

I have to say I can’t imagine a better death than this. And yet... it is also a death he didn’t learn anything from because he was in complete control. 


John Updike -

P117 “legerity” - le·ger·i·ty. physical or mental agility or quickness; nimbleness.
When "legerity" first appeared in English in 1561, it drew significantly upon the concept of being "light on one's feet," and appropriately so. -Merriam-Webster 

Very well written. His death is in some ways even better than Freud’s -- the one and done approach to chemo. But he doesn’t get to control the timing as Freud did. Interesting that I found this moving and yet I still have no desire to read him.

To return to sex and smoking and limit experiences, it would seem that that Krishna-like Updike had died long before.


Dylan Thomas - 

And this one is about his marriage. But also about drinking and the “metaphor of being sick.”

Oh, Roiphe tricked me. She played the crime procedural game on me and I fell for it. It isn’t those earlier, obvious subjects but the loss of his talent that is the root of the problem. Perhaps.

P182 About “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”: “When you hear him (in these last readings) reciting the familiar line, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light,’ the cadence is so mesmerizing that it seems to be a poem about acceptance; it lulls you into a feeling of goodwill toward the workings of the universe. Its emotional effect is in fact the opposite of the meaning of the words: It is a paean to the natural order. When one hears the last soft, caressing ‘Do not go gentle’ one can’t help but be lost in the loveliness of the lines, seduced. When Thomas stands up onstage, incanting it in his unnaturally beautiful voice, ‘Though wise men at their end know dark is right,’ it is a lullaby, drained of violence, drained of anger. You can suddenly hear in his voice what you cannot see on the page: This is on some very peculiar level a love song to death.”

That was amazing.

P186 “...They brought him to St Vincent’s Hospital... His medical records show that he had suffered ‘a severe insult to the brain.’ ”

Dear God, we are all doomed as we’ve suffered nothing but insults to the brain since 2016.

What an ass. I hope Caitlin did well after his death.


Maurice Sendak -

P241 “Maurice viewed artistic influence as an active process. He picked an artist to borrow from for many of his projects. As he put it, ‘The muse does not come pay visits, so you go out stalking, hoping that something will catch you. Where do I steal from?” ... ‘He had a way of swallowing an artist whole, but what he came out with was wholly his own, unmistakably a Sendak drawing.’...”

This reminds me of Martha Grimes and Faulkner.

P243 “After Eugene died, Maurice wanted Lynn to take photographs of his body. He held on to these photographs and liked having them.”

This seems to be a call back to Annie and Sontag.

“Eugene was cremated and his ashes were buried in the garden with Jennie...” Okay, that line got me. 

P247 “This seems to be key: Staring into something you have always been terrified of [death] and finding it beautiful.”

P260 So like my father’s death. The time of day when we seem to be least tethered to life. 

All but one of these deaths were hospital deaths. Even the great have a hard time avoiding that fate.

Thinking about deaths in The Brothers Karamazov -- as one does -- the two deaths that Dostoevsky uses to show Christian values and attitudes and possibly a connection with the Perennial Philosophy, are completely unlike these modern deaths in that there is so much less fighting and intervention. Only Sendak seemed to enjoy a degree of peace and transformation in his final days. Sontag certainly didn’t. 

It is curious that Christian civilization, which has traditionally denigrated this life, has spawned a medical system that fights death as though it were sin. Freud may have been aware of the appeal of death and he did decide to go out on his own schedule, and yet up until then he had fought it as tenacious as had Sontag. Really it was only Thomas who was not ready to do nearly anything to avoid death -- though there is Freud’s smoking to consider. 

If I were to write a book like this, I would try to find subjects who had had time for a more contemplative death. I think that is possible, though increasingly rare with our medical system.

It amazed me how many things I recognized from my father’s death (and life) in this book. His death was exactly like Sendak’s. I held his feet in the hospital just like Updike’s first wife when he was having congestive heart failure. And the discussion of how painful a heart attack is reminded me (thanks a lot) of how, when he had his first heart attack when I was 16, I drove him to the hospital (mistake number one) and dropped him off at the front door so that he had to walk through the hospital to the ER, because I didn’t know where the ER entrance was. Of course one could make a good argument that, in fact, my Id was throttling my Super Ego until it passed out and then gleefully convincing my Ego to avoid the ER entrance. Bad Id!


James Salter -

I was unfamiliar with him but I love his way with words. I need to read this section again.

P283-4 This is why I’m grateful that my mother in a sense betrayed my father, by calling 911 when he went into congestive heart failure the night after his 79th birthday, giving me time to attend his actual death four or five unpleasant days later. I haven’t experienced death coming for me, but I have been around death at work and it is strangely natural.

I would like to know what happened with some of the incidental people after the deaths of these famous people. The helpers who were a little more than servants but not quite family.

I have some things I would like to ask my parents now, but they are just about random things in my childhood that they might remember. Confirmation of what I think happened.

With not smoking, it’s not so much wanting to live forever as not wanting to die in that particular way. 

And shouldn’t the subtitle be “Great Authors At The End?”


There was an element of finding and needing meaning in life in all these stories. The meaning of their art (or self-image) sustained them. But when it failed, as with Thomas, they fell apart.

342. Greening 2019

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AIDS Walk 2019

Yesterday was AIDS Walk, which went really well again. For one thing there seemed to be an over abundance of us. I only worked four hours because we were done early. I reminded everyone of the factors that can make this event go sideways -- an abundance of “free” mixed stream boxes a producer of lube always gives the event, and overly enthusiastic volunteers who will pull bags too quickly that still need to be sorted. 

I arrived just as the walkers were returning and the entertainment was starting. I quickly determined that the Chevron area was creating the most mess so I worked there until it was time to start taking down our eco-stations. The problem here was that Chevron was mixing plastic flatware and lots (LOTS) of little condiment packages with the paper plates of food. So I was pulling out the plates -- with some food and a few cups -- after knocking off the plastic items. This resulted in a bunch of bags filled with my usual nearly 100% compost while the contamination built up at the bottom of the containers. But this was a nearly perfect event for me as I got to sort down the four stations in the Chevron area myself.  After getting out as much of the good stuff as I could reach, I would pull the bag and add it to the next station, slowly getting more and more of the food that had fallen to the bottom. By the final station there was just a mess of plastic and some food that I was happy to toss into the landfill. Then I moved on to shut down other stations that I had not been maintaining.

This was in Golden Gate Park’s Sharon Meadow. This being July, we didn’t get any sun until almost the end of the site cleanup. Typical summer in SF. 


One interesting, and surprising, thing happened yesterday. The new woman last year, who at this event was annoyed by my pulling out compost she had just sorted, praised my method. Either she finally noticed how it works or she finally noticed that I have “special” status with our boss as the oldest employee (who remembers details like the lube boxes from hell from year to year). Don’t know which it is. Don’t really care.

Undiscovered 2019

Surprise! (for me) they moved it two blocks west. Luckily you can just catch a glimpse of the new location down Jessie. 

The new location is a little harder to get to but also more secure. And the event is now more like a baby La Cocina event. If it gets any busier we’re going to need more than 6 yards for the compost. 

I trained the new guy, who seems to be a quick study. Since it was already busy when we started, I was in sorting and pulling mode, so he, to my surprise, copied that as well as just the basic sorting. I was prepared to cover one of the eco-stations in the entertainment area, as well as the ones in the food area, but the first time I hit it he was already there doing what I would do. Happy day.

Because it was so crowded at my end, dropping my sorted bags in the toter at the south edge of the event worked well. It might have been easier for E___ to use the toter, instead of the wheeled round, for hauling, but that would have left the bag stash more visible -- though I’m not sure anyone would have cared.

The only problem at the end of the day was that my head-lamp batteries had died so I had to improvise to do the final sort of the station bags. That and the mess left by some vendors.


I pulled a single blue glove from the compost -- just to mess with me, I’m pretty sure. And the event staff put a stack of pizza boxes in the compost without removing the plastic spacers or foil condiment packs because, of course they did.

Art & Soul 2019

Another greening season, another Art & Soul Festival in downtown Oakland. What I like about it is that it's the first of the Oakland events I work with James, who supervises another crew that does mostly hauling and grounds. That and that it gives me a chance to get warm in the middle of a cold SF summer.

What I don’t like is the amazingly consistent resistance of A&S goers to what we are trying to do. They insist on throwing their food and plates into the landfill, and if you call them on this some will tell you they do it on principle because sorting the trash isn’t their job. It, apparently, is the job of the Man. The food vendors are also total assholes, but that never really changes. I only had three vendor eco-stations to maintain this time so I would go in, sort them all out, work the street and concert areas for an hour, return and find the most ungodly and unlikely messes. Which took much longer to sort out than if we just collected their damn bags and sorted it and kept them away from the sorted bins. I’ve actually sent out an email suggesting we drop the pretense of “vendor self-sorting” but I doubt that will fly since people would rather believe that we are slowly educating the public and vendors. After twelve years of greening work I can attest that there is no change, especially with vendors. Though to be fair, every year at this time I have to ask what the Oakland bin colors mean because gray for recycling and burgundy (brown) for landfill makes absolutely no sense.

At the very end of my shift on Sunday I was scheming the pickup of a bunch of leftover food from the caterer in the VIP area behind the big concert area near me, while trying to wind down the vendors. Some had already left so I pulled the properly sorted compost and recycling toters and put them out in the street to be taken to our dumpster location. A bunch of MEN were sitting around the other eco-station talking and drinking while the women took down their setups. I couldn’t even get to the station because of the lounging men so I said screw it and headed for the VIP area. Which turned out to be a good decision as they managed (how?) to not know that their Sterno cans didn’t belong in landfill. So I collected them for reuse while my crew chief showed up for the food pickup I’d been scheming since the previous night, when we composted all the leftovers. (I was really hungry and they looked delicious.. But getting them home on the train is just too much bother.)

There was at least one funny thing that happened on Sunday. We have a worker who admits to being OCD and, while much better lately, has a tendency to be too perfect when sorting trash when it gets busy. But she’s the perfect person to sic on a dumpster that is obviously too contaminated. 

Anyway, the first time I worked with her and noticed her problem was at A&S many years ago. I was working the same area (around half a dozen public eco-stations plus the vendor stations) and she was supposed to be covering for me while I took a lunch break. I left her working a particularly vile BBQ place where they were giving away small, but free portions of ribs. Most of the ribs were going into the landfill, because Oakland, and she was trying to sort that out. I took my half hour break and returned to find her still at it. She had never left to cover the other stations she was so focused on getting this one perfect. Sisyphus had nothing on her. I was so pissed, imagining the state of the other stations, that I left her at it and rushed to clean up the mess she had inadvertently made.


Anyway, her soul sister was working Sunday and she too was focused on the landfill bags. It is hard to let all the good compost at the bottom of landfill bags go at A&S, but it’s a war you can’t win unless you stay at one station all afternoon. But at least I was keeping the four eco-stations in order (by quickly pulling out the bulky paper items on top) so she was actually helping, but in a way that doesn’t make any long term sense. This time I was just amused. I probably should have talked to her about it, but I’m not sure that’s really my job. And, except when she wore out the bottom of one landfill bag and left it leaking it’s contents onto the street, she was making my job a little easier.

Outside Lands 2019

I arrived an hour early at the usual service entrance but they wouldn’t let me in there. I walked miles -- around the event -- to the entry closest to where I was supposed to be working but they weren’t letting anyone in there. I finally tried the main entrance for concert goers but they didn’t like my backpack and water bottle. So I left. First time I’ve ever not managed to work my shift.

That was Friday and I’m next scheduled for Sunday. I will go in without my backpack or much of my gear and with little enthusiasm. This is my least favorite event anyway and now they’ve made it even worse.

Sunday
Well I did finally get in and to my work area, but it was a pain and took about an hour. I also managed to have my phone die on me -- for the first time -- so I couldn’t contact anyone when I was stuck short of where I needed to go. But then the coolest thing happened. While sorting bags of trash I ran into a brand new cable, still in its packaging, so that I was then able to recharge my phone. And it’s a neat little cable, much smaller than mine. So I ended up coming out ahead there. Of course I did have to pay $4 for a bottle of water since I couldn’t bring mine into the event.

As before, we got caught-up before the last set and they stopped bringing us more bags, so we had nothing to do until almost time to quit. 

Oh another cool thing happened: Almost at the end some people from a bar booth started bringing us their trash on a golf cart. There were bags full of beer cans -- and unusually for a vendor, they was nothing but beer cans so they could go directly into the recycling. I went to grab some more of the bags so I was too late to catch the woman tossing the entire, unopened bag into the dumpster. You have to open them up and dump the contents. Fortunately, I had a younger coworker to send in to get the bag. And he found a bunch of other bags that had no business in there. We had no idea how or when they went in. But the point is that, if not for the woman tossing in her bag, we would not have noticed the others. It SO worked to our advantage. Or at least my advantage since I wasn’t the one who had to jump in and fish them out.

Unfortunately there was no upside to the guy I helped dump a large toter of “recycling” into the recycling dumpster only to then discover it was completely mixed trash. We had to fish out all the trash and compost. The same guys had a toter full of compost that we opened the compost dumpster so they could dump it directly and they managed to do that in the worst way possible, so that stuff was draining out under the doors. Aside from those two idiots, it was a pretty good shift.

341. Photography San Francisco

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Photographs

It's been a while since I last did a photo post. Let's see what I've accumulated,

Here's an interesting new building gate I photographed just today (why this occurred to me).

Here's a building in my neighborhood that has long had a problem with people camping on their front "stoop." I noticed they had taken care of this by storing a bunch of stools out there, but it was only last week that I finally noticed that the stools are bolted to the paving.

It does work.
This next may be hard to explain.

They are currently in the process of upgrading Camino del Mar in Lincoln Park. In particular, they are reducing the storm runoff into our sewer system. There are several of these structures that are designed to capture water from the street, let the water flow from one deep basin to the next (Note the the little gates at the low point in the little walls) giving the water time to be absorbed into the ground. Eventually, if necessary, any water beyond what the system can absorb will flow out the opening at the end and go to either the next structure or to the storm sewer.

This is my favorite Wee Free library, also near Lincoln Park.

Okay. I know this is strange, but I have always had a thing for outdoor lighting -- street, parking lots, even the side of buildings. This is a classic 1960s street light fixture but the only time I've ever seen it with four lights. Someone when BART's MacArthur Station was being planned noticed this rarely (if ever) used option in some catalog. It's only a matter of time before it gets replaced by an LED fixture, so I wanted to capture it.

Architects are having more fun with parking structures these days. This one is in downtown Berkeley.

340. How It All Began

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How It All Began

by Penelope Lively - Viking 2011

P13 End of chapter 1.  Oh, I do like Lively. Already we’ve got three strong point-of-view characters. First there’s Charlotte the elderly woman we start with who’s been mugged; then her daughter Rose, another strong female character, and finally Marian who shares my habit of redecorating spaces when bored. Though Marian is a decorator, so knows what she’s talking about. Rose and Marian are both middle aged. 

And we also got just a bit of Rose’s employer His Lordship or Henry. 

P22 Chapter 2. Henry is rather more important here. His forgetting his notes and making a mess of his lecture -- in particular forgetting names -- is clearly Lively making something out of the inability to remember names she spoke of in her other book. The thing is, forgetting the name Pitt is not something that only comes up in a lecture. Surely he would have realized this problem before and had some experience with dealing with it -- I know I have. It’s a bloody nuisance but you can make light of it and either use others to help prompt you or failing that, kill time until the name comes to you. What’s even worse is when you completely lose your train of thought. But again, this is not that unusual. Of course Lively is making the most of this because it is so annoying for academics in particular. 

P24 And we get just a dash of Thomas Hobbs.

I am attempting to apply both Stoicism and Roombaism to the crises in this novel. It’s an interesting exercise. So far the crises have been: Charlotte getting injured in a mugging -- you move on and deal with the PT; Stella learning her husband is having an affair -- for him, you can make an argument for moving on to a less difficult relationship, for her there doesn’t seem to be either a Stoic or Roombic option; Henry’s disastrous lecture should lead to either a new approach to doing these things or an avoidance of the situation. I kind of think Roombaism wins this comparison.

p30 “...Henry is in fact out of touch with the eighteenth century. He stopped thinking much about it a number of years ago, he has not kept up with new publications. The eighteenth century has moved on, leaving him behind. History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion. Henry is well aware of this, and aware that the eighteenth century has disappeared over the horizon so far as he is concerned, reconstructed, reinterpreted.”

It is interesting to see how Lively pulls things from her own life into her novel. The bit about traveling on London buses (I didn’t quote) is from her own experience, this bit about history is thanks to her late husband. But I take issue with Henry’s being so removed from his subject. Lively was around 78 when she wrote this interesting observation about the 18th century “moving on.” She continues to process her reality. As much as I dis-esteem academics, I have a hard time believing they don’t continue to think about their subjects -- just as I occasionally come upon a novel thought while rehashing either philosophy or history. (Just confirmed that Lord Peters is 76.)

P86 Chapter Six - As with Martha Grimes, I’m wondering if Lively starts with a plan or just lets the characters lead her forward. I assume Anton’s having been an accountant will come to something. I assume things will go in surprising directions, rather than calming down, since the point of this novel is how a random event can lead to changes. It’s the old butterfly effect again. Unless I’m wrong about that, Butterfly Effect might have been a better title. (I had forgotten that she mentions the Butterfly Effect at the very beginning.)

Lively has much more experience with the nobility than I do, but one of the things I actually like about them is that they tend not to care what others think, since they are born to their status. Lord Peters’s discomfort here seems middle class to me. I’m probably wrong.

P99 Chapter Seven - I’m never in Starbucks because I hate their process for serving iced tea, but I was there today when I read this chapter, which is largely set in a Starbucks. This is an interesting Starbucks simply because it faces a busy bus stop -- just off Market and across the street from the Bank Cafe (always closed on weekends, but now doubly closed for remodeling of Peet’s.) Here you see waves of FOB-looking Chinese and tourists. Three or four busy bus lines stop here. Sitting where I am in the window, it’s hard to notice what the people are doing in the Starbucks. Currently there’s a guy standing in the middle of the sidewalk right in front of the doors who seems to have misplaced his last brain cell. 

A nearly spherical man just climbed slowly off a bus and paused mid-sidewalk to light up a cigarette. Probably he juggles machetes as a hobby.

P101 Chapter Eight - I love where she’s going with Lord Peters. “A certain awful appeal. The voice, the manner, everything. You’d be sticking your neck out a mile, putting him on. People would love him or hate him. A provocation. Risky -- oh, yes. But just might be a winner.” Delia, a very minor character is considering put him on TV. Without wanting to insult Lord Peters, this could also have been said about Trump at the beginning. And I love Marian’s disbelief that Delia is agreeing to even the one show. (I’m sorry he didn’t have a little success in TV.)

P105 Now this is interesting, here is Lord Peters working up the script for his pilot, “ ‘I myself have a soft spot for what is known as the Cleopatra’s nose theory of history -- the proposal that had the nose of Cleopatra been an inch longer the fortunes of Rome would have been different. A reductio ad absurdum, perhaps, but a reference to random causality that makes a lot of sense when we think about the erratic sequence of events that we call history. And we find that we home in on the catalysts -- the intervention of those seminal figures who will direct events. Caesar himself. Charlemagne. Napoleon. Hitler. If... this person or that... had not existed, how differently could things have turned out?’...”

This is the historical twist on the butterfly effect. So another alternate title, Cleopatra’s Nose. 

And this passage continues, “... ‘A decision is made in one place, and far away a thousand will die. There’s an analogy, I understand, with a process that interests the physicists -- chaos theory. The proposition that apparently random phenomena have underlying order -- a very small perturbation can make things happen differently from the way they would have happened if the small disturbance had not been there. A butterfly in the Amazon forest flaps its wings and provokes a tornado in Texas.’ ”

P142 Chapter Eleven - Jeremy is interesting about the way he likes to lead life flying by the seat of his pants. I had to do something vaguely similar during my freelancing days, but I was never comfortable with it. I’ve always preferred something more routine and dependable. And I agree with Lively that this seems consistent with a man also being unfaithful to his wife. Though I also agree with Marion that Stella should know him well enough to be able to deal with this by now. 

I’m reading this at the Peet’s near Uber and they are playing hits from the ‘60s that are not the usual hits from the ‘60s. Songs that I know from the first bar or two though I haven’t heard them for decades. Some maybe since the ‘60s. And this reminds me that, as I noticed before with Lively, there’s little to nothing about music in this novel. Curious.

P154 “...Story, yes, indeed, but the fascination of story is what it can do. Henry James can tell it through the eyes of a child, and make you, the reader, observe the adult chicanery and betrayals of which the child is unaware. Charlotte needed to remind herself of the sleight of hand whereby this is done...” I haven’t read James but this makes me think of a favorite part of The Diary of Adrian Mole, when his mother is having an affair and he is oblivious.

My Bank Cafe is still under-construction -- taking longer than expected -- so I’m at the neighboring Starbucks again with hot tea, having given up on their idiotic iced tea, and have discovered an advantage to this location. Here one may enjoy, like a cat, the afternoon sun coming in the front window. If the sun ever hits the Bank Cafe windows it would be in the morning. Glare not so good for using the computer, but great light for reading and, after the gym this morning, it’s nice to absorb some UV rays.

P174 Chapter Fourteen - This is quite wonderful really, Jeremy and Stella’s secret romance. I don’t exactly like Jeremy but you have to admire him a bit. 

P202 Chapter Sixteen - How does one forget one has a million pounds in equity? This comes into the story like a Victorian bequest, but really! Are things so different in England that... Oh! Never-mind. Just realized that without income a bank would be unlikely to give her any sort of loan even with all that equity. 

Finished. Marion came out the best here. Jeremy and Stella did fine. Henry and Mark did well. Charlotte came out a bit worse for the wear. Rose and Anton had the best story though without the dramatic, romantic ending. Gerry dodged a bullet without ever knowing.

339. Warriors 2019 playoffs round 2

Link to Table of Contents

Warriors!

Once again one of our local sports teams has done something exceptional. And I don’t just mean they won, but they won in the context of a phenomenal story. It’s always the story that pulls me in. The next paragraph is background on the Warriors for the tiny group of people who aren’t familiar with their story, but might be interested in getting a quick review so they can appreciate the “story” I want to talk about.

The Warriors team was built around two amazing shooters, guards Steph Curry and Klay Thompson who are known as the Splash Brothers for their ability to hit 3 point shots. With the back court in place, the organization -- which is a model of what a basketball team should be -- started building up a supporting front court with Dramon Green and Andre Iguodala (a veteran starter and one of the most outstanding 6th men in the game). They won a championship but the next season they came up short against the same team they had beaten the season before -- there were some good reasons for this. The organization responded by going after Kevin Durant, either the best or second best individual player in basketball, depending on who you ask. With KD, Curry, Thompson, Green, and Iguodala they constituted what is popularly known as either the Hampton’s 5 or the Death Lineup. This group led the team to back to back championships and was leading the team through the second round of this year’s playoffs when KD went down with an injury late in game 5 against Houston. This has been a very close series with, through game 4, each team winning their home games. The Warriors were home for game 5, so this gave Houston a shot at “breaking serve” as it were. Last year, the Warriors/Houston series was the REAL championship as, after just barely beating Houston the Warriors easily defeated the champion in the east. The basketball world had been eagerly anticipating Houston getting another shot at the Warriors now that one of their players, Chris Paul, was healthy. Now, late in the 5th game, Chris Paul was healthy and they were playing the Warriors even in the series, winning their two home games while the Warriors won their two home games. That's when the Warriors lost KD to injury. That’s the setup for this story. A frustrated team, eager for revenge after feeling they were cheated the previous season finally given an advantage against the champions. This is when it gets interesting.

The Warriors managed to pull out that game 5, putting them up 3 games to 2. The next game would be in Houston and then a game 7 would be played in Oakland. As I’ve said, so far the home team had won every game and now the Warriors would be going to Houston short arguably their best player. Steve Kerr, their coach, was forced to play his bench -- the non-starters who had seen very little playing time because this was, to date, a close run battle between the starters -- and they responded brilliantly. But basketball is impossible to predict and Steph Curry, quite possibly the best shooter of all time, ended the first half of game 6 with zero points and three fouls -- so that he had to be pulled off the floor. So now the Warriors were missing KD and Curry was shooting blanks or sitting on the bench. Sounds like they’re doomed, right? No.

Klay Thompson and the bench managed to play Houston to a draw in the first half. Fate gave Houston two huge handicaps and they couldn’t take advantage. Then came the second half.

If KD isn’t the best player in basketball, then that honor goes to LeBron James. The Warriors sought out KD mostly so they could use him to balance the advantage James gave the Cavalliers the year they didn’t win the championship. And that strategy worked for two years. After game 6 LeBron James Tweeted the following, “NEVER underestimate the heart of a champion!! !!” 

After scoring zero points in the first half, Steph Curry scored 33 points in the second half. Especially in the crucial fourth quarter, he took over the game sinking long threes while also attacking the basket for easy twos. The dagger to Houston’s heart was a perfect Warriors play that started with Curry, passed though the hands of almost the entire team before it went to Klay Thompson who buried yet another three. It was a master class in team basketball.

The Warriors still have another series to get through before they make it to the championship round, and the longer they play the better the chance of their getting KD back, along with two of their centers who were injured earlier. They could get even better by the end. But what people will remember is what they did while short handed against a very dangerous opponent. 

Bringing the story up to date

That series against Houston seems so long ago now. The next series, against Portland, was also entertaining, but in the end the Warriors won. They then faced off against Toronto in the finals. Toronto won in 6 games but the Warriors team they defeated was without two of its three best players. Both KD and Klay Thompson started game 6 but left with new, more serious injuries. The Warriors did well with the players they had left, but that wasn't good enough.

Since then the Warriors team, and indeed many of the teams in the NBA have been blown-up and re-imagined. Last I heard, the Warriors will start the 2019-2020 season with only four players from their "dynasty." A fifth player, Klay Thompson, will return later from his injury. Most of the new team will be new faces and I'm actually eager to see how they do. I suspect that the "dynasty" is over, however. 

What's a little awkward about this is that they are also leaving Oakland and moving to a new facility in San Francisco. Instead of showing off a championship team in their new house, they will start with a team that is still learning how to play with each other.

338. Autumn Light

Link to Table of Contents

New book - Autumn Light

by Pico Iyer - Knopf 2019

Tale of Genji referenced on page 14. God help me.

P22 I didn’t pay much attention to the description of the failed new development of Nara in the ‘80s, but this is a perfect example of top down planning that doesn’t understand how cities and business work. It was like Skywalker Ranch on a much larger scale -- a lovely idea but not really practical. He references Mountain View, but even Mountain View and the original Silicon Valley only made sense because of Stanford and the existence of San Jose and San Francisco nearby. That and the fact that the first generation of tech engineers were mostly from the Midwest. Suburbia appealed to them, especially California suburbia.

P30 “...I can hardly recall the bright-eyed kid who made such a pius point of telling himself that purity and kindness and mystery lay inside the temple walls and that everything outside them was profane; the beauty of Japan is to cut through all such divisions, and to remind you that any true grace or compassion is as evident in the convenience store -- or at the ping-pong table -- as in the bar where two monks are getting heartily drunk over another Hanshin Tigers game.”

This is pretty damn close to my response to Buddhism -- though he left his pal the Dalai Lama and people like him off the hook with that ending. The point I think he is making here is that Japan encourages a mindfully sacred way of looking at life while not rejecting life as most religious traditions do. His teachers are not the Dalai Lama and his local equivalent, but Hiroko and the routine of life in Japan. This does make me curious about how different his life is in California. 

P32 “...I can hear kids chanting... the forty-seven syllables of the hiragana alphabet, in the ceremonial song that features every syllable once and once only.
...

“This song, though, might be the scripture of Japan. ‘Bright though they are in color, blossoms fall,’ I hear the children shouting out. ‘Which of us escapes the world of change? We cross the farthest limits of our destiny, and let foolish dreams and illusions all be gone.’ ”

Well that’s pretty profound for a school song. I tried to find the rest of it through a Google search and could only find a link to this book. 

Among the things that Iyer doesn’t cover, but I wish he did, are more about his relationships with his own family -- another book, perhaps. His feelings about SoCal. And, since there’s a fair amount, thanks to Hiroko’s father about wartime Japan, a little about how things like education changed after the war. Most of what I know about pre-war Japan and the education system has to do with the indoctrination program.

P33 “The season is a kind of religion, I think, to which we offer poems and petitions, but it’s not one you believe in so much as simply inhabit.”

P34 “It took me a while, after I settled down here, to realize that every detail -- the apples, the boxes they sit in, the table on which we place them -- counts, because none of these things is inanimate in Japan. Only yesterday, Hiroko remembered, ‘I small time, I kicking table -- sometimes little angry -- every time, my father say, “You must apologize! To table. That table has heart. It never hit you. Why you must hit it?” ‘ “

I bet her father could have explained why the Japanese military didn’t repair damaged planes during the war. Something I’ve read about but never understood. I think it’s related to this idea of animation.

P37 ...”What makes the air feel thronged [in Japan] is the presence of household deities and ghosts, the spirits that for my neighbors inhabit every last desk or box of chocolates. Nothing essential ever seems to die in Japan, so the land is saturated with dead ancestors, river gods...”

This reminds me of the Ryuko Lady in Genji who, even after her death, possessed Murasaki. There was no further mention of Genji after that first one, but I do wonder what Hiroko would make of this aspect of The Tale. Would she find it exaggerated or very familiar?

P41-42 So I guess the Japanese Buddhist notions of death and after death are quite different than the Tibetan notions. Since you are supposed to be reincarnated after a year, it wouldn’t make any sense to honor the dead past that period in Tibet. I’m not sure about the other Buddhist traditions in India and SE Asia.

P46 The mother in law refusing to eat (but secretly eating) is so like the prince’s daughter at the end of Genji. I’m doomed.

P50 I love Hiroko’s baseball analogy. Sometimes it seems like the true purpose of American foreign policy is to spread baseball around the globe. It has only taken root in places where we have profoundly messed with the local culture. I wonder if they see this as reasonable compensation?

P54 The point of this introduction into being Japanese is so opposed to our being ourselves. While he is using ping pong to show this, I can see how ballroom dancing would work even better.

Pico reminds me a bit of Bill Bryson in how he ends up in Japan. So far, and I know this is his intention, Masahiro is the most interesting thing in the book. How is he possible? What is his story? It is a great way to preserve your status since you can’t do anything wrong if you are never there. He’s like a god you choose to imagine in the best possible light and no one can argue since he’s invisible. 

Pico has just mentioned that his own father was not happy with his own life choices -- why Hiroko never met him -- but we aren’t learning much about his family so far. Settling in Britain or Japan is a little like ignoring your own family, though not as decisive. More passive aggressive than outright rude.

P88 "Tokyo Story" and Yasujiro Ozu are a call back to The Elegance of the Hedgehog, unsurprisingly.

P94 Of course the brother is the absent heart of this book. Such an interesting story and perhaps a plot less predictable than the story of aging and death. You expect some kind of resolution or else why is he writing this? (And why is he giving so much information for a potential stalker? Have they moved now?) From my perspective, I see that siblings have options that only children don’t have. Or they do but it would be even more egregious. 

Here’s a question, Are Hiroko’s charming lines her English or his translation of her Japanese? What language do they usually speak? 

P112 The battleship Hiei that sank at First Guadalcanal was named after Mount Hiei. That was the battle in which the USS Barton was sunk (family connection to our book club. A better way of putting this is that First Guadalcanal was the battle in which both the Hiei and the USS Barton were sunk.) 

Just hit the part where everyone is reminiscing about the past and in particular their work past. There are different ways to count this, but I’d say I’ve had around fifteen different jobs, all of which I liked to some extent. My twelve years of greening work is the longest period I’ve done the same thing. I worked in tech for a similar time but as a writer, tester, and coder. And for many different employers. Though it is also seasonal, so I imagine I worked more hours as a bookstore clerk. Hard to know for sure.

P139 Being sent to Manchuria was probably the best way to survive the war. You were very fortunate if you were sent east and survived.

P143 Transient global amnesia -- oh, great, something new I’ve never heard of to worry about. I did think it didn’t seem like a stroke, but this would be very confusing. Of course if you were alone you would probably just go to sleep and wake up fine. So maybe not so bad.

P158 Interesting about forgetting your own observations. I know this is true for me as well thanks to blogging, especially with books. Hard to know when you’re plagiarizing yourself. 

P191 He mentions Thoreau translating the Lotus Sutra but not that he was reading the Bhagavad Gita at Walden. Like Iyer, he was a mix of Western, Indian, and Japanese influences. I didn’t say anything about the passage with the Dalai Lama but he captured what I had a problem with on my friend’s chanting tour of South Asia -- the places are of no real importance. I was thinking -- with some pride -- that there are no particular sites associated with philosophy. The Academy in Athens is an exception, but it isn’t regarded as sacred or anything. Walden Pond, come to think of it, probably has as much status as the Academy does. And that makes sense as it is the nature experienced there that is important. Unlike with a religious “sacred place” the connection with nature Thoreau experienced there is available to anyone willing to look for it. Of course Thoreau would say this patch of nature is not so different from others so you shouldn’t have to travel there to see what ought to be visible everywhere. 

I guess I was naive to expect any kind of resolution in this book. I am surprised that he has taken the liberty he has with the brother’s story. Not exactly kind, but a reasonable guess, I guess. And I’m still surprised he gives so much personal information. Unless he’s fictionalized it.

P227 I love the way he shows us Hiroko, 
“ ‘You writing autumn story?’...

“ ‘Not so much story,’ I say. If autumn is a religion, it’s something you recite -- or see with your eyes closed -- more than put into words.

“ ‘Like Ozu movie?’ she asks in apprehension. My attempts to inflict the seasonal explorations of mood and dissolving families on her have not been a success...

“ ‘You know me,’ I say. ‘I’m so greedy for sunlight, I need to be pushed into the dark.’

“ ‘Your book, nothing happening?’

“ ‘Well, not exactly nothing. But what happens is not so visible. It’s hard to see which parts are important until years later. Or maybe never.’

“I see her watch me skeptically, and gird myself.

“ ‘When I came here, I was so taken by everything that was different, full of drama, so distinctly Japanese. Like you when you go to America. Now I see it’s the spaces where nothing is happening where one has to make a life.’

“ ‘Little no-action movie,’ she says, visibly unpersuaded, and closing the pages of this book without needing to open them. ‘Rain come down window. Car stuck in traffic jam. Quiet music playing. Autumn light.’ 

“Exactly.”

I would love to hear her synopsis of The Tale of Genji. Perfumed men raping every women they see then musing about becoming monks but never getting round to it.

It's curious to me that he briefly references his family's connection to Theosophy without any suggestion of the Hindu influences. I wonder if this was part of his awkward relationship with his father?