Radish Sandwiches

Radishes and Vaccines

I'm going to lunch at a boutique butcher shop near her apt. that serves sandwiches--including my favorite:
radish sandwiches.

$8 for thinly sliced radishes and a handful of cress on buttered baguette. All organic!

I don't care, it's worth it.
Whenever I've bought radishes, I've ended up in a month (or two)  throwing away a bunch of pale shriveled balls I discover in the bottom of the fridge.
 ❧
^ The "floral heart bullet" aka "hedera" (ivy) looks like a radish!("The hedera was used in Latin texts as a punctuation mark between paragraphs in long documents, when line breaks weren't common...")
 ❧
I got my flu shot this morning and asked the nurse who administered it what I can say to the guys at work who tell me they aren't getting one because, quote,
"The flu shot gives you the flu".

"I hear that all the time," she said.
"I tell them the flu virus in the vaccine is dead and can't give you the flu. It's like showing a picture to your body to alert it what the flu will look like, so it can guard against it."

That sounds good. 
Alas, my BOSS has already announced in the lunch room that the flu shot gave HIM the flu, so anything I say won't make much difference.
But at least I now have a script in hand.

(I want my coworkers to get flu shots out of pure self-interest:
the flu takes two weeks to incubate, so they could be infectious for a while––and the flu vaccine is not 100% effective. I don't want them to pass it on to me!)

Library Thing

It's so interesting, working with people who have different information, ideas, and reference points.
It makes me question mine––not doubt them so much as check them.
I didn't know enough about the flu shot to explain it--or the electoral college, either, when that came up.

I accept a lot of things because they come from sources I trust, not because I understand the things themselves all that well.
And my coworkers do the same.

Or, rather, they don't accept things because they come from sources they do NOT trust--namely, any government agency...

But really, these guys have about as coherent a world view as many of the more formally educated people I know.
Like, they would think it was insane to pay $8 for a radish or two, a sprinkle of greens, a tablespoon of butter, and a couple pieces of bread.

Still, I am not saying, "Oh, it's all the same if you're educated or not."
It's not all the same.
The big difference, I'd say, lies in whether or not you know how and where and--and most importantly, that YOU CAN look for information (as well as knowing how to judge if it's reliable or not).

A thing I am happy about is that I'm becoming sort of a librarian for my coworkers. They've started to ask me to look for books or other media for them. 
I know who wants the latest Sports Illustrated, if it gets donated, and who wants The New Yorker (a new volunteer).

Some customers ask me too. One wants every- and anything to do with the cartoon Peanuts. I saved a copy of the Joy of Cooking for another regular customer, BJ, who, the other day, gave me a T-shirt* she'd got at a garage sale for me: 

LibraryThing

What's on your bookshelf?

Here I am in the thrift store parking lot:

And now I'm off for my insanely expensive totally wonderful radish sandwich! 

*I just looked it up--LibraryThing is a site 
( www.librarything.com )
where you can "enter what you’re reading or your whole library. It’s an easy, library-quality catalog."

The Little Reds' Halloween Costumes

It was costume day for dolls, here at the Castle of Toyes.*

My sister (seated), and I, and bink, made Halloween costumes for the Orphan Reds.

Below, L to R: I made the Zorro costume for Red Hair Girl;
Penny Cooper wears Druid priestess garb of brocade and raw silk;
and SweePo won Best Costume for her werewolf, by bink.

Costume parade at the lake:

* The name "Castle of Toyes" comes from Marz mistaking the title she saw on the spine of a book lying around here: Getting Toyes.

In fact, the book was the old chestnut about how to negotiate, getting to yes.

Update: preachiness deleted

I posted this on my FB today––& shared my thrift store post:

[I deleted the preachy rant I had written here, and I apologize if you read it.]

The massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue is ...

I have no words. 

". . . spasms of bleak dust"

I was telling my sister about the question of dust in literature, and she immediately said, "Gatbsy!"

She sent me this excerpt, and while I didn't remember it (haven't read the book in forever), for me it wins the prize of Best Dust in Literature.
"The dust that opens Chapter Two in The Great Gatsby." 

"About half way between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight. But above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg."

[First edition, with the eyes]

Dusty Answers

I. Dusty Words

How fun! Orange Crate Art got LOTS of responses to this question, which he blogged yesterday:
''Can you think of a work of literature in English in which dust plays a significant part?" 

If you have more titles to add, I'm sure they'd be welcome (or answers are welcome here too: don't be put off by "literature"--anything printed counts––or "in English" either--I thought of Jesus writing in the dust...)
--or just go check out the interesting comments:
mleddy.blogspot.com/2018/10/literary-dust.html

I don't know why that question was so popular, but it sure caught my attention--if you go to the post, you'll see six of the twenty-one comments are mine!

 Starting with Dusty Answer, (1927) by Rosamond Lehmann---here, below, with her brother John, and Lytton Strachey:

I haven't read Dusty Answer in probably ... forty years? But it popped right into my mind, re: dust.

The title is from a poem I dislike by George Meredith:
“Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul,
When hot for certainties in this our life!”

Now I want to read it again, though I worry I will find it mopey and drippy. I loved it at seventeen, but since then, for me Bloomsbury has lost its bloom.

II. Dusty Records

Today at the thrift store, a coworker put a few 78 rpm records on my desk, for me to check their worth.

I rolled my eyes. I'd recently sold three milk crates of 78s for $10 per crate––JUST GET THEM OUT OF HERE!––but when I bothered to look at them--wow,  there were a couple very cool things!

The T.S. Eliot isn't worth much, but it's FUN--I put it out for $2.99:

But this Woody Guthrie 3-record set, Ballads from the Dust Bowl, (1946) is worth more, especially since the records are in great shape--I priced it high at $75, and put it in the Special Cases case.

It ties into one of the three books Michael (OCA) had in his mind as dusty literature--John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

(I didn't even think of that, though it'd made a big impression on me in high school.)

Cool Old Things

I officially launched a Cool Old Things section in my books area today. I've been tucking things among the Cool Old Books for a while now, but today I gave them a couple shelves of their own.

I have more vintagey things the back, but if items sell quickly, I won't be able to keep the shelves full---the store does get cool donations, but not all that many all that often.

My favorite is the Northwest Orient red wool blanket (loved it so much, I took it home & washed it so it was saleable) along with the grey and white Northwest airline plastic coffee cups. 
A couple things, like that seafoam-green soap dish, are leftovers ––things I'd listed on ebay. (Most things sell there, eventually, but a few don't.)
Ebay just takes too much time--most things can be sold in the store for a lower price, but since there are no fees and much less time is spent, the profit is about the same.

Except, there really is a lot of shoplifting at the store. It used to bother me, but now I don't much care. 
I mean, I don't like the idea of someone who can afford stuff stealing it, but I can't know that, and mostly I just want someone to have the stuff.

There's so much stuff.
If you steal it, I just ask, please, enjoy it!


This regular customer,  >
a really nice person who always finds the best stuff in the store, bought a Cool Old Bear off the shelf. 

She let me take her photo for Facebook with the bear, who she named Goldie.

I'd saved the bear from the garbage, where the toy lady had thrown him.

"Nooo!" I said. "He's vintage!"

I priced him double our usual $1.99. Almost took him home myself, but I have a backlog of bears... (Firefly is still patiently waiting to be patched, rejointed, and stuffed.)

I also took a cast iron pan out of metal recycling. The ladies are always putting cast iron in there, if it's rusty. I should make a sign...

In fact, I did stick a sign for this pan on how to season it. It's a little inexact. (I hope no one sets their kitchen on fire or something...).
I'm going to post better instructions on Facebook. 

Girl Band

The Orphan Reds were patiently waiting for the song to start playing when I left this morning.

The Reds have a funny sense of time; I wasn't sure if they'd just wait there all day, or what.

When I came home, they'd started a cover band! They were practicing "Be My Baby" by the Ronettes:

Guess who just read "A River Runs Through It".

Tuesday is the start of my working week---I'm heading off to the thrift store as soon as I finish this cup of coffee.
I feel pretty well positioned at work these days.

I  pushed hard, inviting the boss(es) to consider fundraising for the store, trying to lure them with the possibility that It Could Be Different.

But--what's the term for when everything comes together seemingly effortlessly?
The ease that causes wonder?
That.

That didn't happen.

What happened was more like almost catching a fish.... it nibbles, and then slips away. 

I don't know. Things that don't happen right away, sometimes they happen later, in surprising ways.
And sometimes they don't happen at all.

At any rate, I've decided to let it go for now, and I feel fine with that.
No point splashing down the river, chasing fish--you just scare them away. I was on the point of pushing too hard.

The culture at work––I keep saying this––is foreign to me.
It's a blend Christianity + poverty, so there's this wonderful, hopeful sense that "God will provide", 
but almost none of the Purposeful Planning that's a given in my middle-class world.

That works pretty well---up to a point.
God does provide dish soap when you run out, 
. . . or, someone does:
it gets donated, or someone brings it in from home, or, eventually, the boss goes and gets a bottle at the Dollar Store.

But the energy expended, over and over, on these little things means you don't have the energy for other things.
It's tied up with every day having to scramble for supplies. 

The idea that things could be different, and that YOU can make that happen––well, that's not been my coworker's life experience!

A lot of my coworkers--(and they say this)--are grateful to be alive.
"How are you?" I ask.
One guy always says,
 "I'm blessed. I woke up this morning."
That's not a cute platitude for him.

So I am going to watch and learn. Settle down into the mud of the riverbank and watch the fish. NOT with the intention of changing them. How might I change? Deepen and quiet?

Having said that, I am going to keep trying to change what is changeable at the store, right in front of me.

My biggest success (besides the bookshelves) has been putting a wastebasket in the women's bathroom, right by the toilet. 
The only trashcan had been across the room, on the other side of the sink.
It's still there.
I stuck a plastic bag in a big metal bucket--a kids' beach toy--and hey,
now there's less trash on the floor!!!

Also, I have invited my boss and a board member/volunteer on a field trip this Friday.
We're going to go visit the newly reopened Steeple People--the thrift store where I got my start volunteering in thrift, 2013-2016.
They had to close because of development (city's doing a lot of building)--just two days ago they reopened with a new name, in a new place!

"Competition is good for innovation." So says Forbes, in an article I sent my boss. Maybe we could get some ideas about merchandise layout, or... who knows?

"You a man? Got a car?" (How We Avoided the Apocalypse)

"You a man?" a three year old asked my preschool-teacher friend John. "Got a car?"

John reported the little kid's question as funny story, but it was pretty clear he felt slightly emasculated by the answer. He is a man, but he does not have a car.
Can this be?

"Starsky & Hutch" action figures, with Starsky's famous car--

even I who care naught for cars know it's a Ford Torino

 ______________________

I'm not sure how to approach this... this, desire of mine to muse on this moment when we've just had a sharp reminder of the perils of fossil fuels.

Maybe I could approach it as if I were collecting notes or snapshots for a memoir or a social history about Life in the Era of Fossil Fuels I will write in twenty years, 
or notes for a sci-fi novel... 

There's so much gloom––how about if I write a comic sci-fi novel,
 How We Avoided the Apocalypse!?

Unfortunately I'm no fiction writer.

For my notes, I could record, for instance, that on Saturday my coworkers told me there was a terrible car crash on the corner, half a block from the thrift store--one car had flipped over and the woman driver was trapped inside, they said.

We call such crashes "accidents", as if people just happened to get into enormous (and expensive) metal vehicles fueled by explosives to travel at speeds guaranteeing that any impacts could cause life-threatening damage. 

An accident is something that happens "by chance".
Driving a car isn't an accident, and the nature of humans guarantees that cars will crash.

[Side Note: I love cars, they are great inventions!
I wish that long ago we had arranged American society so that there were, say, a couple cars per city block––I don't know, something like one car per 25 people?––and people shared them.]

After work on Saturday afternoon, I went to wait at the bus stop on the same corner. The police were still blocking a lane, and the wreckage of two smashed, empty cars was still being cleared away. The windshield of one car was almost completely stove in.

The street is a busy thoroughfare: the many cars, buses, bikes, and foot traffic force vehicles to move at a relatively slow 20-30 miles per hour.
I couldn't imagine how such a massive crash had happened at this speed. 
Some bad mash-up of physics happened.

As I sat there, cars took turns navigating around the crash, guided by traffic police, and pedestrians stopped to look,  . . . and life appeared to go on as normal.
(Of course I can't know that the crash had no greater impact. Maybe some witness went home and declared they are never driving a car again.)

"Normal."
It's normal to see car crashes in this city and other American cities. I see (or hear) some fender bender at least once a week, I bet. Bad crashes less often, but maybe a couple times a year? 

No one intimately close to me has been killed by a car, but I know plenty of people with crash injuries (esp. bad necks) that linger.

It's not so normal to see wounded people hanging upside down by their seat belts, as my coworkers reported, no––but it's within the realm of the acceptable norm.

I'm the odd one in my culture, because I don't drive.
People ask me why--my abnormality makes people curious. 

The truth, as I posted about the other day, is that when I was young I was too lazy to bother with all the work of paying for and owning a car. I never had ambitions that required a car to fulfill. I mostly wanted to read books and write at home or coffee shops, or go see movies--places I could get to on foot or by bike or bus, almost for free.

As I've gotten older and the population, and hence cars, has increased, I also find cars more and more frightening.
I used to think I'd eventually get a driver's license, but at this point I never want to drive.

I do happily ride with others in their cars--and chip in for gas. 
I accept the risk occasionally for the pleasure and expediency of things like going out of town, or taking trips to the grocery store to haul heavy items such as laundry detergent, or going to movies across town in the dark cold of winter.

Here's my favorite example of high-carbon life that people in my futuristic comic, sci-fi novel will find almost unbelievable:

People drive cars to gyms in order to exercise on electric machines.

The Perils of Red Bear, II

Red Bear hasn't gotten much stage time since the advent of the Orphan Reds, but she's still very much here. 

Last spring at the Baraboo Circus Museum in Baraboo, Wisconsin, she and SweePo (going by Spring Green at that time, before her haircut) put on a dramatic enactment, 

The Rescue of Red Bear.

[Red Bear had escaped an earlier Peril there too.]
Photos by bink.

1919 Plate

A 1919 advertising calendar plate commemorating the end of World War I, November 11, 1918––donated to the thrift store. 
The 100th anniversary of the war to end all war is three weeks from today.

Years ago, before everyone carried a mobile phone, I was in a work meeting on November 11, Veteran's Day. Someone had tried and failed to reach a coworker at his family home in Belgium.

Another coworker said maybe our Belgian friend was out of reach because it was a holiday.

"Oh, is it a holiday in Belgium too?" the first person said.
If they'd had this plate, they'd have known by the flag labeled Belgium.  

Around the dove and the date are the words "Peace with Honor."
The plate is compliments of Hagen & Co. North Dakota.

A Thing I'd Miss

A Thing I'd Miss . . .  if we didn't have electricity.

escalators

Strange Comfort

I've been wanting to take a bird's eye view of my, and our, life and times, here at this juncture when the UN's science panel has just provided us with a sharp warning about impending climate breakdown. [Guardian article]

I've been singing "I've got that sci-fi feeling" to the tune of "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin' "*
––that sci-fi feeling I get when I see our world at a remove, as if we were in an unfolding novel––a sci-fi one, which we sort of are. 
One we are both characters in and creators of...

And I've been thinking of St. Augustine––how he lived (354–430) in northern Africa (present-day Algeria) during the decline of Roman Empire, including the Sack of Rome in 410––I'd thought of that on 9/11 too.
 
Oooh---look---artist William Kentridge's huge, long mural about the history of Rome "Triumphs and Laments" was made with “reverse graffiti”: power washing away the pollution on the walls along the Tiber River.

Here, from a cool article about creating the mural ––recreating figures from Mantegna's "Triumphs of Caesar":

Human-made calamities are not new and unique to us, of course.
As Augustine wrote in The City of God:

"In various times and places before . . . , the human race was crushed with numberless and sometimes incredible calamities."

He's refuting the accusation that Rome had become weak because it had become Christian--pointing out that it––we––suffered plenty before. 

I don't know that that's comforting, exactly, but it does put things in perspective--like the little boy in My Life As a Dog reciting terrible events to himself to contrast with his falling-apart life.
I suppose that's a kind of comfort---or strengthening medicine.

Oh! To strengthen is the original meaning of "comfort"!
I had never thought of its etymology: from late Latin confortare ‘strengthen,’ from com- (expressing intensive force) + Latin fortis ‘strong.’

This is NOT to say, "well, we survived this sort of thing before", which is ridiculous: many of us didn't survive catastrophes (an estimated 60 percent of Europeans didn't survive the Black Death)––though again, Augustine offers a weird comfort: 
that no one died who wasn't going to die anyway.

Well, OK, then. 
If you died at a young age in 410 or 1347, or if you lived to your natural life span, either way, by now you'd still have been dead for a long, long time. 

And on that weird note, I'm off to Sunday coffee with bink!
____________________

*"now you're gone, gone, gone..."

The Righteous Brothers are white?
I always pictured them looking like Barry White, not... egrets.
But no, they are the original "blue-eyed soul".

"You've lost that loving feeling..."

Cold Front & Carbon

Last night's wind blew in the cold, alright---it's 33º this morning, with flecks of white in the air. As I write, the flecks are multiplying...

My bike had a flat so it's in the shop for a tune up. I'm splurging and buying snow tires for my bike this year: $60 each! At least bikes need only two. I hope I can bike much of this winter, since I can take the path along the old rail line--the Greenway--90 percent of the mile-and-a-half to work.


Thinking about climate change, I can't think of One Huge Obvious Thing that I could do to drastically reduce my use of carbon (such as stop driving)––not because I am a champion of environmentalism, but because I am lazy.

I figured out long ago how many hours I'd have to work to pay for a car, for instance, and it seemed a bad deal, especially since working so many hours meant I'd mostly use a car to get to work. Ditto home-owning: lots of work to have more space. Though that might be nice, it's not for me.

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote a novel about Saint Francis that opens with one of Francis's followers saying that laziness had been his own path to God. 
That's been the case with me and the high-carbon lifestyle.
When I was young, my hardworking Wasp grandmother told my mother she didn't understand why I had no ambition.

Laziness has gone hand in hand with my philosophical beliefs ––or is that just a cognitive bias (we choose beliefs that back up our lives)? 
I don't think that my temperament was the only thing that dictated my beliefs, and to the extent it did, it didn't have to work hard.
I always said, "I'd rather have time than money."

Since I've wanted to spend my time sitting around, reading and looking out the window, that's worked well for me.

It's key, of course, that I live in the richest land ever. 
I've always known I was living off the gravy of that society--no moral credit whatsoever to me!
I've benefited hugely from free education growing up (and affordable college tuition, in my day), libraries, free media, cheap groceries, the internet, thrift stores stuffed with almost-new stuff, ibuprofen and other over-the-counter drugs... plus the HUGE luck of having fundamental good health.

It's been a grand life! I always said, one day we'll look back and marvel that we used to have HOT RUNNING WATER anytime we wanted.

I dislike the superior moral tenor of modern minimalists---they can live the way they do for the same reasons I do––because other people have footed the carbon bill.

Temperament aside, growing up during the first environmental movements of the 60s and 70s influenced me too. At an impressionable age, I learned about pollution + consumerism. Our hippie neighbors helped start the first food co-op in town. Back then, co-ops didn't stock any packaged food, or meat, or provide bags... 

Now food co-ops in town are slightly more benign, maybe, than chain grocery stores, though you could argue chains are less damaging because of the economy of scale, since it uses less carbon to transport huge amounts of food than to deliver small orders to boutique stores.

Time to go to work. I just wanted to start thinking about this...

What's Your Gang?

I'm lying on the couch, feeling like writing about nothing much.
It's 7 p.m., I can see the moon rising above the apartment building next door. The tree branches are blowing, making me wonder if a cold front is moving in. 
We've had nice, sunny weather in the 60s the past couple days, but it snowed last week--only stuck on the ground for a minute, but still... That's early.

🦕 [I have animal emojis!]

Are people out there talking and thinking about the UN report on climate change? 
I see some people talking on FB & blogs, but my coworkers aren't, not around me anyway. 
I'm the cultural outlier at work, though, and I don't always follow how my coworkers think about things. For instance, I've heard three people, including the boss I like, say they aren't getting flu shots because "that gives you the flu."

I don't say anything, usually––we don't have a fund of knowledge in common. 
But sometimes there's overlap.

The other day a few guys were talking near my work desk about gangs of their youth. We're mostly all over 55, and they're pretty mellow guys now, but a lot of them came up a rough route––black and poor––lot of them did prison time and stuff. 

One of them had told me a while ago that he'd moved up here from Chicago because, he said, "I was tired of all the killing. And I figured I was going to be next."

This guy turned to me during the discussion about gangs and said,
"What was your gang?"

I was silent, trying to think how to respond. He said,
"I asked you what your gang was---don't think! Just answer!"

"Trekkie!" I said. "I was a Star Trek fan. Still am."

"You're a Star Trek fan?" he said.

"Yeah, but only the original series with Kirk & Spock."

And then he stated to sing, at the TOP of his voice, and he has a strong voice,
"Captain Kirk, I want yo BAAAY-BEEE!"

I'm sure you could hear him out on the floor.

Turns out, this is from a rap song from ten years ago, by Master P., called "Captain Kirk."
Another coworker found it on youtube and played it on her phone.
"The Ghetto Enterprise has landed..."

Ha! Not my set of references, but I had to laugh.

After that, I decided I'm going to dress up as Mr. Spock for Halloween. I have a science-blue velour V-neck top and black pants and boots. 
Not sure what to do about ears---maybe I'll just make paper points and ... glue them on?  🦊
bink says her gang is terriers. The Terrierists!

🐿
I'm going to read now. I'm reading The Shipwrecked Men, excerpts from Cabeza de Vaca's account of how an expedition of six hundred Spaniards to the New World in 1503 were reduced to four--a Penguin title in their Great Journeys series.

I'd learned in grade school about this "journey"––more like a death march––but it was presented in the most boring way, like most of the history I encountered in school. Now I bet kids get to read excerpts---or, if I were their teacher, they would.

Good night, my gang!

Genet Is Okay

I didn't like feeling cowardly, as if I were hiding something by not mentioning reading Jean Genet.
I went ahead and posted on Facebook a photo of Sweet Potato (SweePo), here at breakfast with sleeves pushed up like Genet, and steeled myself for a possible negative response:

But, it turns out, Genet is okay.
Flavor of the day.

One friend wrote a comment suggesting the Orphan Reds mount an all-doll performance of The Maids (eek!); another said they had recently read up on Genet because an academic friend who is an expert was coming into town.

This did not make me any happier than being attacked, actually, since I think Genet's writing is wonderful––wacky imaginative, funny, even, and tender in spots––but disturbing.
I don't know enough about him, but people who worship strength always make me nervous.

Ah, well. No one ever said FB is a place for complex conversations, even with oneself. 
At least I'm not covering up, and I'm happy about that.

On View

Blown away by Jean Genet

This was, honest, the scene on the back of the couch this morning.

The Orphan Reds look like sweet little girls––everyone on Facebook reads them that way––but they are unreconstructed wild things; I never should have let them near Jean Genet, which they got into last night after I went to bed.
 

And his Funeral Rites, of all things!

You know they like bee burials. I fear this has given them unsanitary ideas.

"Let's eat the bees!"

I'd never read Genet; I picked him up in a Little Free Library yesterday and skimmed Funeral Rites last night.

It was outrageous! 
I loved reading it, and then checked myself, "Do I love this?"
I'm not sure.

When have I read anything that isn't entirely clear?
Most writing these days is quite clear about where it stands, its political (sexual, racial, gendered) identity labelled, curated, crafted, positively artisinal!
 

Godknows I wouldn't post this photo of the Reds & Genet on Facebook, where uncertainty and contradiction are not allowed. The book's politics are obscure to me--Genet hates the Germans, who killed his lover, yet worships the Nazi's hard body--is this anything more than [currently in vogue in liberal circles] Tom of Finland–style worship?

I googled to see if Genet's considered anti-Semitic. Not blatantly (not like Céline!). But the jury is out. Someone who knows the received wisdom on Genet's politics would skewer me if I got it wrong. 

Genet's treatment of his dead lover's fiancée, a vulnerable little housemaid, is tender, wonderful:
the final paragraphs of the book describe her funeral rite––laying a faded daisy in a patch of sun on the floor. 

After all Genet's pyrotechnics of grief––Genet imagines his dead lover presenting his (the lover's) corpse to be eaten––this final scene is, the girl is, as the Internets said last year, a cinnamon roll, "too good for this world, too pure."

For now, I just want to enjoy the complicated brilliance---it bounces off the writing like sheen off a beetle.

Here, Genet worships his dead lover by locating with his tongue a pubic crab––transferred, he imagines, from his lover's body––in another man's groin:

"With my head in the hollow of his legs, my eyes sought out the sacred crabs, and then my tongue, which tried to touch that precise and tiny point: a single one of them. My tongue grew sharper, pushed aside the hair very delicately, and finally in the bushes, I had the joy of feeling beneath my papillae the slight relief of a crablet. . . . My mouth was filled with tremendous tenderness. The insect had left it there...."

I was thinking I'd never read anything like that, and then I realized---sure I have!  
John Donne's "The Flea".

"Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be..."

I have to go to work now. This post is as much about feeling angry at how sanitized the literary culture has become as it is about Genet. I'm angry that I'm afraid to write about this on Facebook. Even if I was brave and did it, what would be the point? 
None, I think.

Of course I wish we could wipe away racism and sexism and all that tripe.
Of course.
But the problem with cultural sanitation is it hides things away.
The sewage is still there, it's just out of view.
With Genet, it is fully out in the open, glistening like crazy in words.

Favorite Movies, #12 & 13 (Big Lebowski & WALL-E)

Two more Favorite Movies, from my series on Facebook
First, let me say, I don't like myself on FB.

I am seduced by its immediacy, but I end up feeling like a performing bear, shuffling for marshmallows.

I need to keep my account, in order to post on the thrift store's page, but I'm going to make a big effort [again] to write more here.

(Truly, more than chasing the instant "likes," it's a matter of laziness. I do the least, there.)

#12. The Big Lebowski

I dislike the cruelty that runs through all the Coen Bros. movies, so I don't want to watch this movie again, but I find comforting the very idea of The Dude, who, in the midst of this cruelty, only ever wanted to get his stolen rug back––without spilling his White Russian. That rug, you know, it really tied the room together.

Jeff Bridges (The Dude) happens to be practically my only celebrity-sighting so far.

(When I was fourteen, the summer of 1975, on vacation in Washington, D.C., I saw Dustin Hoffman.
Hoffman was sitting on a park bench in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, being filmed in All the President's Men. 
Or, waiting to be filmed. 
I watched for an hour while the film people set up lighting and wires, before I got bored and walked away. Along with Truffaut's film Day for Night, this was my introduction to the tedious work behind film magic.)

Now I was forty-six, and it was 2007. The Big Lebowski had been out nine years, but I hadn't seen it.
I'd spent a week visiting my [attractive] friend Lauren in Santa Barbara, CA. The area is full of rich people---Oprah has a house nearby. My sister had been all excited that I might spot some movie stars, so I'd asked Lauren to help me be on the lookout.

I hadn't seen any stars, however, by the time Lauren took me to the local airport to go home. There, in the small ticketing area, leaning against the ticket counter, was a big cowboy-looking guy. Turned away from the counter, he was surveying the people in line, and when he saw Lauren walking up, he smiled.
It was like a car turning on the brights.

"Who's that cowboy grinning so blatantly?" I wondered, before Lauren pulled me close and whispered, 
"You can tell your sister––that's Jeff Bridges!"

That didn't mean much to me, or to my sister:
no Dudeist, then or now, she declared I'd only seen a Class B star.
Now that I love The Dude, I'm impressed I saw his actor, but what really stays with me was the high wattage of the guy's smile.

Movie stars. 
They are different from you and me.  

#13. WALL-E

Here is the opening of Wall-E, side-by-side with the scene of characters Cornelius & Barnaby singing the song that's playing,
 "Put on Your Sunday Clothes", in Hello, Dolly! (1969):

"WALL•E/ Hello, Dolly "Out There" Comparison"


Wall-e is genius, the way it weaves pop culture references into a hopeful apocalyptic tale. It includes lots of delightful tips of the hat––to Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apple computers, even Alien (Sigourney Weaver is the voice of the computer, which doesn't want the humans to return to Earth---like the ship's AI in Alien is not on the human's side).

Delightful, fun to spot, but not surprising in a sci-fi movie, given these are all sci-fi-ish references (even Apple).

But Hello, Dolly!? 
I'd wondered about that, so I was happy to find this article, from just a few months ago (June 27, 2018), "WALL-E turns 10: Andrew Stanton explains the film's Hello, Dolly connection".

Here's a snippet from the article:

"Speaking to EW for the 10th anniversary of WALL-E, director Andrew Stanton calls the pairing 'the craziest idea I have ever had.' He explains, “I had always wanted to open with something old-fashioned compared to this apocalyptic, futuristic setting.' . . .
"Stanton had portrayed Barnaby, one of the two idealistic young men singing 'Put on your Sunday Clothes,' as a freshman in high school, and as a result had the musical in his iPod library. 'Suddenly that song just came on and it struck me; it came on late at night while I was reading a book,' he remembers. 'I turned to my wife and I said, "I think I have the strangest idea I’ve ever had."
'I just kept waiting for it to fall apart. There were so many reasons why it wouldn’t hold. It was so incongruous that it was attractive, and so we worked it into the story.'
. . .

"After WALL-E debuted, Michael Crawford, the original Cornelius from the 1969 film (who can be seen in the footage in WALL-E), called up Stanton to ask him out to dinner. 
"'[Crawford] said when he had to punch the very beginning of the song with the orchestra and say the phrase ‘out there,’ he was never getting it right, and finally [director] Gene Kelly had to come out of the booth and come over to him,' Stanton explains.
'[Kelly] said, "Kid, you gotta sing this like it means more than the world. This is bigger than the universe, just think of the stars." And the take that they used was the one where he was thinking of the stars when he sang ‘out there.’
So when he saw the opening of WALL-E and it was just this field of stars, it just blew his mind.'"

Saturday Night, Sunday Morning

Red Hair Girl has had an exciting weekend.
On Saturday night, she went to Bingo at the Catholic church where I used to work. bink had free tickets.

RHG quickly became bored with Bingo and extemporized for the Halloween Costume Contest, using empty wrappers from the free candy at every table.
She didn't finish in time for the costume judging, but that was OK--the judge didn't even know who Tintin was, so what chance would a small, imaginative doll have stood?

We got a ride home from an old church friend, and RHG connived to be left in the car when I got out. Thus she got to spend the night with her friends at bink's house, 

where the Lion has gone to live with Daryl.

bink sent me this:

This morning, RHG came with bink to our usual Sunday coffee. This week, we went to the place with the toast bar.
You get to make your own toast, and choose your toppings and sides.

Daryl introduced her to this thing called "avocado toast":


But Red Hair Girl only wanted the triple-berry jam.

Whew! This girl leads an adventurous life. I just sit and darn and watch.
Today, I started repairing this wool sweater the moths got at this summer, stitching around and connecting the little holes.
(And there are more.)
I call it, "The Tracks of Moth Tears":

Downtown with Penny Cooper

Penny Cooper heading to Penny's café (real name) to meet my sister (in blue) for tea. She has put her real dress back on but kept the purple velvet trousers of her musketeer costume that my sister made for her.

Afterward, I headed to the downtown farmers market, Penny Cooper in my pocket. Red amanita mushroom hat knitted by Julia.

Bedside Table, & Nancy Thinking

Rat Lamp (goes by "Rat Lamp") lives on my bedside table and reads to the others.
Rat Lamp is one of my all-time favorite possessions.
I spent more on it ($110, about twenty years ago) than anything else, except big-ticket items such as my orange couch and my bicycle.

_______________________

Not directly related, I thought this "Nancy" from yesterday (Oct 8 2018) was pretty brilliant. (I am happy I already have a blog index tag for "thinking".)

That person is getting ice cream . . .

. . . Should I get ice-cream too?

I'm sitting at the ice-cream (and coffee) café. This afternoon I helped Mz put plastic over her big window (to cut down on drafts)––the earliest I've ever plasticized for winter. 

We are colder, earlier, than usual––in the high 40ºs this week.

But not too cold for ice cream.
However, no, I'm going to pass. I already have coffee with sugar and half-and-half.
At home I drink coffee with 2% milk because I don't like it so creamy (weird but true); when I'm out in the afternoon, however, this is a treat--and it's pretty much ice cream.

Also, this place makes "artisinal" ice cream, which tends to be over-flavored. Sea Salt Vanilla? That's just plain, salty ice cream.

Oh! Now I look closer, I see they have white licorice today--that's a favorite of mine.
Hm.

No, I think I'd rather go home and have cheesy pasta for dinner.
It's the season for hot comfort food.

Best Outcomes, I: Fall on Your Sword

A Facebook friend just posted about the Kavanaugh appointment to the Supreme Court, and a (male) friend asked her what the best outcome would have been.

I commented:

"What I would have admired most would have been if K had withdrawn. A compassionate and honorable person (even if he was not guilty!) could have used the situation to make amends by not accepting the nomination.

"He could have said something like,
'In recognition of the unconscionable number of women and girls (and boys and men) who have suffered like CBF has, and because I believe it does not serve the Court and the country to have such politicized appointments, I will not accept this nomination.'"

While I'm wary of grandstanding, in this time of #metoo (yes, OF COURSE me, too! I can't think of a woman who doesn't have some icky sexual story to tell--and of course many men do too), in this mess, I could stand a little noble, old-fashioned falling-on-my-sword/buck stops here for the greater good. 

But these guys!

They don't show any compassion---even if they are wrongly accused, couldn't they say, "You know, so many people get a shitty deal, I am so sorry for that, and my experience of being wrongly accused has opened my eyes to what they might feel like ALL THE TIME"?

I haven't followed all that closely. Has some guy said this and I've missed it?

Best Outcomes, II: Doing Better

This morning I finished a little article for the quarterly newsletter. I write or heavily edit about half the newsletter.
My boss intends these articles to be puff pieces, and he started the newsletter to bring in cash donations. 
I think he thinks I whip the articles out, but I am not that sort--I always research the topics.

The one I finished this morning was supposed to be about how wonderful it is that the store employs lots of older workers. But when I looked more closely into the situation, ... well, it's not that wonderful. 
The store pays the least it can legally get away with and that is not anywhere near providing the justice and dignity the mission statement talks about. 

I talked to my coworkers, and most (all?) of them rely on some sort of government assistance, including what used to be called food stamps. (I rely on money I inherited from the sale of my father's house.)

Basically, the store is taking advantage of poor, old people who can't find other employment. The work is physically heavy, too, and I  can see that a lot of my coworkers are in pain. Same as when I worked in the nursing home--a lot of my coworkers were wounded, but worked anyway because they had no options.

Along with the article, which I kept mild, I sent a stronger note saying I believe the store should consider if this is how they want it to be. Even though the store can't afford it today, I wrote, we could aim to do better:
personally, I would want the store to work toward paying a living wage, based on the cost of living.
We are a couple dollars (per hour) short of that.

I know, because I asked, that my boss doesn't even know what I'm paid per hour. ($10.25, same as all my coworkers--the legal minimum in this city.)

I have largely stopped saying "we" when I talk about some aspects of the store.
I am not included in the decision making, such as it is, and I don't stand behind a lot of our policies. No one even seems to be asking if they are in line with our mission, which often they are not.
Our mission says we will provide dignity and relieve suffering, AND THE ROOTS OF SUFFERING.

We (I count myself in here) do directly relieve some immediate suffering, for sure---but not necessarily in a dignified way: 
we regularly put out free food, for instance, but for lack of space and tables, sometimes (often) we put it on the floor.
That is not dignified, but everyone's so used to it, no one even says anything.

To change that, we'd have to do some strategic planning--it wouldn't be that easy to reconfigure the space, but it could be done.

It could be done.

Here's the happy thing:
I have calmed down and am not all in a twist about things changing right now.

The store operates more by oversight than intention, and while that's a problem, what is done with lack of will can more easily be righted that what is done with ill will.

I hope I am helping by simply pointing out, Hey, we could do better. We want to do better! 
How could we?

Yes. That's my question. How could we do better? Wishing alone is not the answer.

And now I'm going home to pasta!
Yay!
Even though I've written about serious matters here, I am in a good mood--there has never been a time in history when people weren't creating a mess for ourselves and someone, somewhere was asking, "How could we do better?"