THE LAST VALLEY

"Speak quickly.  I ran out of patience twelve years ago!"--The Last Valley

I took over the Play Read-Through Meetup and I'm trying to find a location for it.  I hoped to book a room at a library branch but that process has proved too bureaucratic for me. I'm going to try for a room at Metro Hall instead.

Monday night I went to a Meetup for over-50 dating.  We met at Chi, the same place where I went to an Organizers Meetup the other year.  Thirty people came, and it was a bit intimidating.

Last night the History Meetup screened James Clavell's The Last Valley, about a group of mercenaries in the Thirty Years War who find a village in a valley that's avoided the general devastation and arrange an uneasy coexistence.  Surprisingly intelligent.  A dozen people said they were coming but just five showed up.

Today I went to Walmart and finally bought new shoes. (I also got a shirt and pants.) Now I'll use my old shoes in the garden and finish gathering in the potatoes so John can put some more soil in the frame.

I finished translating the story "Early Morning Rabbits" into Korean!

Fall cleaning

"The thought left me disconcerted and wanting to know, really and truly and in its entirety, the life and miracles of our famous Spaniard Don Quixote of La Mancha, the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and the model and paragon of Manchegan chivalry, and the first in our age and in these calamitous times to take up the exercise and profession of chivalric arms, righting wrongs, defending widows, and protecting those maidens who rode, with whips and palfreys, and bearing all their virginity on their backs, from mountain to mountain and valley to valley; and unless some villain, or some farmer with hatchet and pitchfork, or some enormous giant forced her, a maiden could, in days of yore, after eighty years of never once sleeping under a roof, go to her grave as pure as the day her mother bore her"--Don Quixote

This week we've been doing fall cleaning.  Think of it as spring cleaning six months late. (Or as I prefer, six months early!) We shifted a lot of junk at the outermost end of the back yard, and I'd forgotten how long it is! It reminded me of my Aunt Alma's back yard in a suburb of Sydney in Cape Breton, which went all the way down to the shore!

My room also got Marie Kondoized.  My computer now has a big table in place of its former old-fashioned desk.  The armchair I used to sit in when using it is now out on the sidewalk in case someone wants it.  We'd got it when we lived in New Brunswick almost forty years ago!  That's the same age as my clock radio, which no longer works as a radio, but I'd still been using its digital clock feature, but now I feel it's time for a change.

When I sat down at my computer on its new table, I had a drink in a glass that came apart in my hands! (It had had a crack at the bottom but I didn't care because it wasn't leaking, even earlier that day when I noticed the crack getting longer.) Hello again, mess.

Thursday night was this season's first opera rehearsal.  This year the Toronto City Opera is doing Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (one of my favourites!) this fall, and I think we'll be doing Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana (another favourite) in the spring.  We started learning Offenbach's Drinking Chorus, just the notes without the French words.

Today we had the first Crowdreads Meetup since Sergei's return from Odessa. We discussed art, and I brought several coffee-table books of ours showing masterpieces from famous museums (National Gallery, Louvre, Prado...). I also printed out Picasso's "Guernica" and Joseph Wright's "Experiment With a Bird in an Air Pump." It occurred to me to say that "Guernica" depicts chaos yet isn't itself chaotic, which John P. thought sophisticated.

Unfortunately, I was way late because the Harbourfront streetcar was off, and the walking route was also blocked, so I had to go to the York Street end of Union Station and go south and east. (I was also late getting home, of course.) The Harbourfront bike path now has its own traffic signals!

Yesterday we were airing out the house because of smoke detector problems, so I had to open my windows, and it was so cool that I put on a sweater (the first of the season). Yet when I went out today I wish I'd taken my summer jacket, it was that warm!

This is a longer post than usual...

DON QUIXOTE

"He spent four days thinking about the name he would give it; for--as he told himself--it was not seemly that the horse of so famous a knight, and a steed so intrinsically excellent, should not have a worthy name; he was looking for the precise name that would declare what the horse had been before its master became a knight errant and what it was now; for he was determined that if the master was changing his condition, the horse too would change its name to one that would win the fame and recognition its new position and profession deserved; and so, after many names that he shaped and discarded, subtracted from and added to, unmade and remade in his memory and imagination, he finally decided to call the horse Rocinante, a name, in his opinion, that was noble, sonorous, and reflective of what it had been when it was a nag, before it was what it was now, which was the foremost nag in all the world"--Don Quixote

I've started reading Cervantes' Don Quixote for my Book Club. (I'm just getting to the chapter about the book-burning, clearly a commentary on the Inquisition.) They say Edith Grossman's new translation is great, and what I've read so far is pretty good.

Over a dozen people came to the History Meetup Wednesday, but the Book Club Meetup Sunday was only Debi and me.  Oh well, I greatly enjoyed The Way of All Flesh.

Friday I had lunch with Sergei and Maria at the new Thai restaurant around the corner from my house.  The last time we'd met I'd promised to take care of Maria's orchid while the two of them were visiting Odessa, but I'd lost it on the way home! (I had a big headache and wasn't thinking straight.) I was worried about how Maria would take it, but she was surprisingly understanding!  They gave me a cup from Odessa showing Ukrainian place names in the Cyrillic alphabet, and they were surprised that I could read most of it.

I did get Maria a new orchid. Tuesday I went to a place on Roncesvalles Avenue, but they only had them in white instead of purple like the original.  On Wednesday I went to a place near King and Parliament, but they didn't have any orchids.  So Thursday I went back to the first place and got a white one after all.

Dinner today was fettucine alfredo, but we tried a different recipe using brie cheese and bacon pieces.  I think I like smelling bacon more than eating it!

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH quotes

Just like I did with Main Street, I feel like doing a whole post of The Way of All Flesh quotes.

"Your question shows me that you have never read your Bible.  A more unreliable book was never put upon paper.  Take my advice and don't read it, not till you are a few years older, and may do so safely."

"But surely you believe the Bible when it tells you of such things as that Christ died and rose from the dead?  Surely you believe this?" said Ernest, quite prepared to be told that Pryer believed nothing of the kind.

"I do not believe it, I know it."

"But how--if the testimony of the Bible fails?"

"On that of the living voice of the Church, which I know to be infallible and to be informed of Christ himself."

"Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.  It is no more to be wondered at that one who is going to turn out a Roman Catholic, should have passed through the stages of being first a Methodist, and then a free thinker, than that a man should at some former time have been a mere cell, and later on an invertebrate animal.  Ernest, however, could not be expected to know this; embryos never do."

"He had fallen, as I have shown, among a gang of spiritual thieves or coiners, who passed the basest metal upon him without his finding it out, so childish and inexperienced was he in the ways of anything but those back eddies of the world, schools and universities.  Among the bad threepenny pieces which had been passed off upon him, and which he kept for small hourly disbursement, was a remark that poor people were much nicer than the richer and better behaved."

A letter from his father: "My dear Ernest, My object in writing is not to upbraid you with the disgrace and shame you have inflicted upon your mother and myself, to say nothing of your brother Joey, and your sister..."

"They say all roads lead to Rome, and all philosophies that I have ever seen lead ultimately either to some gross absurdity, or else to the conclusion already more than once insisted on in these pages that the just shall live by faith, that is to say that sensible people will get through life by rule of thumb as they may interpret it most conveniently without asking too many questions for conscience' sake."

"Nevertheless, what he wanted was in reality so easily to be found that it took a highly educated scholar like himself to be unable to find it."

"If Universities were not the worst teachers in the world I should like to see professorships of speculation established at Oxford and Cambridge.  When I reflect, however, that the only things worth doing which Oxford and Cambridge can do well are cooking, cricket, rowing and games, of which there is no professorship, I fear that the establishment of a professorial chair would end in teaching young men neither how to speculate, nor how not to speculate, but would simply turn them out as bad speculators."

A doctor: "I have found the Zoological Gardens of service to many of my patients.  I should prescribe for Mr. Pontifex a course of the larger mammals.  Don't let him think he is taking them medicinally, but let him go to their house twice a week for a fortnight, and stay with the hippopotamus, the rhinoceros, and the elephants, till they begin to bore him.  I find these beasts do my patients more good than any others.  The monkeys are not a wide enough cross; they do not stimulate sufficiently.  The larger carnivora are unsympathetic.  The reptiles are worse than useless, and the marsupials are not much better.  Birds again, except parrots, are not very beneficial; he may look at them now and again, but with the elephants and the pig tribe generally he should mix just now as freely as possible."

"This was the course things had taken in the Church of England during the last forty years [the mid-19th century]. The set has been steadily in one direction.  A few men who knew what they wanted made cats' paws of the Christmas and the Charlottes, and the Christmas and the Charlottes made cats' paws of the Mrs. Goodhews, and the old Miss Wrights, and Mrs. Goodhews and old Miss Wrights told the Mr. Goodhews and young Miss Wrights what they should do, and when the Mr. Goodhews and the young Miss Wrights did it the little Goodhews and the rest of the spiritual flock did as they did, and the Theobalds went for nothing; step by step, day by day, year by year, parish by parish, diocese by diocese this was how it was done.  And yet the Church of England looks with no friendly eyes upon the theory of Evolution or Descent with Modification."

On a sister's letters: "I daresay she writes very well, but she has fallen under the dominion of the words 'hope,' 'think,' 'feel,' 'try,' 'bright,' and 'little,' and can hardly write a page without introducing all these words and some of them more than once.  All this has the effect of making her style monotonous."

Davenport library

"He said: 'Oh, don't talk about rewards. Look at Milton, who only got five pounds for Paradise Lost.'

"'And a great deal too much,' I rejoined promptly. 'I would have given him twice as much myself not to have written it at all"--The Way of All Flesh

Finished The Way of All Flesh.  If Main Street is a sharp satire, The Way of All Flesh is a savage one!

Next Wednesday my History Meetup is discussing the Holy Roman Empire.  I'd suggested Joachim Whaley's The Holy Roman Empire:  A Short Introduction for background reading.  But that book wasn't at any nearby library branches so I had to place a hold and hope it arrived in time for me to finish it before the Meetup.

I was afraid that the book wouldn't arrive in time, so I started reading Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger's The Holy Roman Empire:  A Short History, which unfortunately was mainly focusing on the formal institutions of the post-Renaissance centuries. (That book I did find at a nearby branch!) But the first book did arrive in time, so that didn't matter.  

They're still renovating the Wychwood branch, so I had to pick the book up Friday at the Davenport branch, which is actually closer to my house but a lot smaller. (That's a photo of it at the top.) One of the things I like about Toronto is those small library branches!  If a future Rob Ford decides to start closing library branches, places like Davenport will be the first to go and their neighbourhoods will be a lot worse off without them...

Friday afternoon I saw Fiddler:  Miracle of Miracles, a documentary about the Sholom Aleichem musical Fiddler on the Roof. (I saw it at the Bloor Hot Docs and renewed my membership--hadn't been there for months!) It reminded me of the time back in 1995 when I flew to London, England, to spend eight months researching my Ph.D. thesis.  The night before leaving I saw a video of the movie version and the finale had the line "Soon I'll be a stranger in a strange new place"!

Saturday I went to Margo's barbecue up in Vaughan.  This cooler weather is giving me headaches!

I've also been reading The Bluffer's Guide to Poetry.  It's a really funny book!

ODSP paperwork

"Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism from which Mr. Hawke had aroused him"--The Way of All Flesh

The ODSP sent me a form asking for financial information to make sure my receiving payments was justified.  Unfortunately, they sent it last month but I misplaced the letter, and I only got the information together now!

It turned out that our garden had two more zucchinis.  We gave one to John S., the other to Puitak.

At the memoir group Monday they actually had a topic I couldn't think of anything to write about! (It was "street hockey.")

It looks like we're past the summer's hottest weather.  I like that time of year when September is approaching and it's warm rather than hot.

On Youtube last week I saw a couple of episodes of the early '70s high school show Room 222.  (It had an original musical theme, in seven-fourths rhythm.) I'd forgotten how pretty guidance counsellor Denise Nicholas was!

A filling

"Of course he thought Casabianca's was the noblest life that perished there; there could be no two opinions about that; it never occurred to him that the moral of the poem was that young people cannot begin too soon to exercise discretion in the obedience they pay to their Papa and Mamma.  Oh, no! the only thought in his mind was that he should never, never have been like Casabianca, and that Casabianca would have despised him so much, if he could  have known him, that he would not have condescended to speak to him"--The Way of All Flesh

Wednesday I had lunch with Pam at the Grenadier restaurant in High Park.  The weather was good so we went for a walk afterward.

Friday morning I went to the dentist and got a filling.  Later that day I read in the new Harper's issue an annotation feature by an American whose dental care suffered from lack of funds!

It turned out that longer book excerpts were needed for the magazine, so I typed up some longer ones.  Really, I like having work that takes a lot of time...

In The Way of All Flesh there's a public school headmaster called Skinner.  Is this the origin of Principal Skinner's name on The Simpsons?

I finished translating "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me" into Korean and started on "Early Morning Rabbits."

I've started reading a Pibgorn story retelling Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet (with Pib in the Juliet role).

THE WAY OF ALL FLESH

"On a tragedy of that kind [preparing for the wrong things] our national morality is duly silent.  It assumes that preparation against danger is in itself a good, and that men, like nations, are the better for staggering through life fully armed.  The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks.  Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe.  It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle.  It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty"--Howards End

"Perhaps his main strength lay in the fact that though his capacity was a little above the average, it was not too much so.  It is on this rock that so many clever people split. The successful man will see just so much more than his neighbours as they will be able to see too when it is shown them, but not enough to puzzle them.  It is far safer to know too little than too much.  People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other"--The Way of All Flesh

After reading just over 100 pages of Howards End, I switched to Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh (which arrived in the mail Tuesday). So far, it's about a nouveau riche publisher's son in early 19th-century England being pressured into becoming an Anglican priest.

Wednesday night my History Discussion Group discussed Haiti.

I've been going through some ebooks finding quotes to include in Miriam's The Silver Fox magazine.  They're books about Elvis Costello's My Aim Is True debut, conversations with Joni Mitchell, musical engineer Mark Howard's memoir, and a book about Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD

On John Ruskin's Stones of Venice: "And the voice in the gondola rolled on, piping melodiously of Effort and Self-Sacrifice, full of high purpose, full of beauty, full even of sympathy and the love of men, yet somehow eluding all that was actual and insistent in Leonard's life.  For it was the voice of one who had never been dirty or hungry, and had not guessed successfully what dirt and hunger were"--Howards End

Saw Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this afternoon at the Yonge & Eglinton.  Mixed feelings.  It had several good scenes but it brought out creepy feelings in me.  Like Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds, it ends with a cartoonish rewriting of history. (But I always like Brad Pitt.)

I've resumed my story translations.  I finished the French translation of David Lewis Stein's "The Huntsman" and started doing a Korean translation of David Helwig's "Streetcar, Streetcar, Wait for Me."

John finished renovating the bathroom and is now working on the dining room, so lately we've been eating outdoors on our new verandah.  Our garden is now producing beans!  

The other week at quora.com I saw the question "What was the most overlooked event of the Cold War?" and offered this answer:

Ronald Reagan’s 1987 post Iran-Contra decision to reflag Kuwaiti tankers in the Persian Gulf just to get in Iran’s face and assert American power in the Middle East.

What does this have to do with the Cold War? The truth is that in terms of US foreign policy, Reagan didn’t end the Cold War but turned it into something permanent that only required a new enemy in the form of Moslems. This reflagging was a crucial step on the road to:

1. the 1991 war over Kuwait.
2. The devastating twelve-year containment of Iraq, accompanied by a long-term US presence in Saudi Arabia that alienated many well-heeled religious residents and (at the very least) gave Osama bin Laden a convenient pretext for turning against the Americans who had formerly armed him and persuading those alienated Saudis to bankroll him in an anti-American jihad.
3. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
4. The ill-starred US occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, more of the same Cold War policies that enrich the Military-Industrial Complex and deplete the USA’s finances and moral “authority,” while demonstrating the opportunism of leading Republicans and the cowardice of leading Democrats. (The Democrats erred disastrously in 1987, sparing Reagan impeachment and guaranteeing that successors like George W. Bush and Donald Trump would repeat his offences. Are they about to repeat that mistake?) Ronald Reagan was a very bad POTUS and a very bad man. Pray for his worthless soul.

HOWARDS END

"Their house was in Wickham Place, and fairly quiet, for a lofty promontory of building separated it from the main thoroughfare.  One had the sense of a backwater, or rather of an estuary, whose waters flowed in from the invisible sea, and ebbed into a profound silence while the waves without were still beating.  Though the promontory consisted of flats--expensive, with cavernous entrance halls, full of concierges and palms--it fulfilled its purpose, and gained for the older houses opposite a certain measure of peace.  These, too, would be swept away in time, and another promontory would rise upon their site, as humanity piled itself higher and higher on the precious soil of London"--Howards End

Our back yard garden has produced half a dozen magnificent zucchinis!  I've already given away three to friends.

Tuesday I had lunch with Maria and Sergei from my Crowdreads Meetup at the Banjara Eglinton.  I ordered too much and got a doggy bag for the leftover rice and nan bread. (The next day at home, we ate Indian food and added that in.) Later, in the lobby of the Yonge & Eglinton cinema, they introduced me to a game that's like Scrabble but with playing cards, whose name I've already forgotten.  For some reason being with friends wears me out, and I ended up with a headache!

The same day I finished the Haiti history and went to the North York Central library to borrow Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh for my book club.  I found the shelf where it should have been, but it wasn't there! (Stolen?) So I ordered it online from Chapters-Indigo, and it should take a week.

In the meantime, I've started reading E.M. Forster's Howards End for John S.'s book club. I was afraid I wouldn't have time to finish it and would have to watch the movie for the second half, but the event was delayed a month so Bob's your uncle!  I'll read the first part before The Way of All Flesh and the second part after.  I've so far read the first 40 pages and I'm not yet sure what the story's about--I have a feeling it's the sort of story where you read the whole thing, then realize what it's about!  One of the characters was comparing Debussy to Monet--I see him more as Cezanne!

Bureaucracy

One of the comic strips I follow on gocomics.com is Pluggers.  It's a cartoon strip about the life of "pluggers," square rural blue-collar Americans of a certain age who lack the health, wealth and sophistication of the big cities. (The anti-Kardashians, you might say.) The strip shows them as cartoon animals, with the writing coming from readers like in that old strip They'll Do It Every Time.  The other day one episode had the caption "Senior pluggers have always been 'green,'" and showed a dog-man paying for a cafeteria meal and saying, "I hope you take cash here."

That cartoon reminded me of something.  Thirty-two years ago I was playing Bureaucracy, an interactive computer game created by Douglas Adams for Infocom. (Their most popular games were the Zork cave adventure series and an adaption of Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) We got this game at the same time as our new Atari 2600 computer, and that was one of the only games compatible with it.  You have to do stuff like feed a llama so you can get a letter from a mailbox without his tongue getting in the way, or withdraw money from a bank by making a negative deposit, or climb up an airport pillar and sneak into the air traffic controllers tower so you can tell them to delay the takeoff of a flight that you'd otherwise miss! (Adams later created the game Starship: Titanic, which sounds fun but I never got around to buying it.)

In one part of the game, you eat food in a restaurant that only accepts cash, which you don't have, so what you have to do is sneak out and stiff them!  This actually happened to Adams in real life once, which I know because of the game's cheat tips.

Back in 1987 you couldn't get cheat tips online, but you could buy them in a booklet where you could see the questions you wanted answered but the answers only became visible when you rubbed a special marker on them. Except that we got the computer and the game in Moncton, N.B., and it was Donald who got the cheat sheet in Toronto, so we'd have to phone him and ask questions that he'd answer from the booklet.  The booklet also had cheat tips for the game Hollywood Hijinx (it was a sort of scavenger hunt on an eccentric movie mogul's estate), which I also ended up buying and playing, but by this time I'd got hold of the booklet and could look up the answers myself.

Another thing I remember is that when we first inserted the game in the computer, all we could get was a notice saying, "Warning:  contents may be damaged!" (It was some glitch in the computer-- Father always would buy the cheapest model in the store...) Which fit into the spirit of the game, of course.

Another thing that Pluggers cartoon reminded me was that I'd read (in Harper's, I think) that today things are developing into a system where the rich use plastic and the poor use cash!  It's similar to how every economy with two types of currency will do that:  it used to be that the rich used silver and gold coins while the poor used copper coins...

Crowdreads

"Among humans, nothing is more valued than a person of unquestionable character." "Among humans, nothing is more demonic than a person whose character may not be questioned"--Pibgorn

"As President I have no enemies and can have none....  There are only the enemies of the nation.  And these the nation must judge"--"Papa Doc" Duvalier

Today was the last Crowdreads for a while. (Sergei and Maria are going to visit his folks in Odessa.) But we had a good time, and the Meetup went on for three hours!  I read a couple of Robert Browning poems, "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" and "How They Brought the Good News From Ghent to Aix." (Browning was a genius for finding rhymes!)

We also did a thing where we took the sentence "Some people think that the most important thing in the world is..." and wrote down different ways to finish the sentence!  I offered these endings:

...defeating the Bad Guys.

...keeping people from aiming too high.

...giving poor people a kick in the ass.

...accepting force majeure.

...Doing Something about whatever has you afraid.

As you can see, I'm a bit of a cynic.

I've just got to the part of the Haiti history about "Papa Doc" Duvalier's sinister dictatorship in the late 1950s and '60s. (He terrorized the country with a network of tonton macoutes, named for a figure in Haitian folklore who carried off naughty kids in his sack!)

Just now I'm reading the early years of Pibgorn, Brooke MacEldowney's  comic strip about the "frenemy" pair Pibgorn the fairy and Drusilla the

succubus.  I read the first couple of years in spring of last year, but this time I'm going to read the whole thing!

I'm still playing the computer game Elvenar.  There's a production facility where you can make magic potions, and whenever I see it, I think of Elton John's "Your Song":

If I were a sculptor, but then again no[?],

Or a man making potions in a travelling show...

I'm funny that way.

Wednesday would have been my mother's 100th birthday if she'd still been with us. (She did make it to 94!)

Air conditioning

This weekend we turned on the air conditioning for the first time this year.  Which meant keeping the windows closed. (I rather like hearing the noises out on the street.)

Thursday night I saw Gillian Armstrong's movie of Peter Carey's novel Oscar and Lucinda (for the second time) with the History Meetup.  I usually can't stand movies about gambling, but this one is handsome and quirky.  I was thinking that Oscar is an Aspie like me.

Saturday at the Crowdreads Meetup we talked about things going viral, and I read some Walt Whitman poems: "There Was a Child Went Forth Every Day," "I Hear America Singing" and "Miracles." (That's why I bought the Whitman book the other day.)

Today at the Memoir group I added "jigsaw puzzles" to our canister of topics, and someone chose it the same day! (That happened before, paradoxically, with "being chosen last.")

I'm now reading the part of the Haiti history book about the two-decade American occupation a century ago.  It's hard not to notice parallels with the later Vietnam fiasco.

HAITI: THE AFTERSHOCKS OF HISTORY

"May the weapons given to the people for them to defend their liberty be turned against my own breast if ever I conceive of the impious and audacious idea of attacking their rights"--Alexandre Petion, being inaugurated President of the Republic of Haiti in 1807. (His rule was limited to the southern part of the country.)

I've started reading Laurent Dubois' Haiti:  The Aftershocks of History for my History Meetup.  It's an excellent book, sympathetic to the Haitian people yet sophisticated in its perspective. Many of today's Third World problems--a parasitic military elite, inescapable debt load, town vs. country--were already visible here in the 19th century.

I'm now going through the Youtube series Let's Play Myst. (That's a computer game I cheated my way through twenty years ago, which spun off many books and games.) I've also been watching the Michael Beach and City Beautiful channel, which go into lots of detail about urban planning.

Wrote another Korean letter to Hongmin.

Today I went out to the Chapters-Indigo at Yonge & Eglinton and bought a paperback with the poems of Walt Whitman. (We used to have a similar book, but it must have been sold.) I also bought The Bluffer's Guide to Poetry!

I haven't yet started reading Howards End.

Finished MAIN STREET

Well, I finally finished the Sinclair Lewis novel Main Street, and a pretty great novel it is!  The book's full of quotable lines, like these:

Sunday sermon: "Don't let any of these self-conceited fellows that are always trying to stir up trouble deceive you with the belief that there's anything to all these smart-aleck movements to let the unions and the Farmers' Nonpartisan League kill all our initiative and enterprise by fixing wages and prices.  There isn't any movement that amounts to a whoop without it's got a moral background.  And let me tell you that while folks are fussing about what they call 'economics' and 'socialism' and 'science' and a lot of things that are nothing in the world but a disguise for atheism, the Old Satan is busy spreading his secret net and tentacles out there in Utah, under his guise of Joe Smith or Brigham Young or whoever their leaders happen to be today, it doesn't make any difference, and they're making game of the Old Bible that has led this American people through the fulfilment of the prophecies and the recognized leader of all nations."

Same sermon: "...but still, as they are a smaller but more immediate problem, let me stop for just a moment to pay my respects to these Seventh-Day Adventists.  Not that they are immoral, I don't mean, but when a body of men go on insisting that Saturday is the Sabbath, after Christ himself has clearly indicated the new dispensation, then I think the legislature ought to step in..."

"It's one of our favorite American myths that broad plains necessarily make broad minds, and high mountains make high purpose.  I thought that myself, when I first came to the prairie. 'Big--new.' Oh, I don't want to deny the prairie future.  It will be magnificent.  But equally I'm hanged if I want to be bullied by it, go to war on behalf of Main Street, but bullied and bullied by the faith that the future is already here in the present, and that all of us must stay and worship wheat-stacks and insist that this is 'God's Country'--and never, of course, do anything original or gay-colored that would help to make that future!"

"In winter, California is full of people from Iowa and Nebraska, Ohio and Oklahoma, who, having traveled thousands of miles from their familiar villages, hasten to secure an illusion of not having left them.  They hunt for people from their own states to stand between them and the shame of naked mountains; they talk steadily, in Pullmans, on hotel porches, at cafeterias and motion-picture shows, about the motors and crops and county politics back home."

"Whenever it comes right down to a question of defending Americanism and our constitutional rights, it's justifiable to set aside ordinary procedures....  we're going to take these fellows, and if they ain't patriotic, we're going to make them be patriotic."

"She had her freedom, and it was empty. The moment was not the highest of her life, but the lowest and most desolate, which was altogether excellent, for instead of slipping downward she began to climb."

"Always she was to perceive in Washington (as doubtless she would have perceived in New York or London) a thick streak of Main Street."

"The film was a highly advertised and abysmal thing smacking of simpering hair-dressers, cheap perfume, red-plush suites on the back streets of tenderloins, and complacent fat women chewing gum.  It pretended to deal with the life of studios. The leading man did a portrait which was a masterpiece.  He also saw visions in pipe-smoke, and was very brave and poor and pure.  He had ringlets, and his masterpiece was strangely like an enlarged photograph."

"Not individuals but institutions are the enemies, and they most afflict the disciples who the most generously serve them.  They insinuate their tyranny under a hundred guises and pompous names, such as Polite Society, the Family, the Church, Sound Business, the Party, the Country, the superior White Race; and the only defense against them, Carol beheld, is unembittered laughter."

"But I have won in this:  I've never excused my failures by sneering at my aspirations, by pretending to have gone beyond them.  I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be!  I do not admit that Gopher Prairie is greater or more generous than Europe!  I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women!  I may not have fought the good fight, but I have kept the faith."

Salsa on St. Clair

On being pregnant: "I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart.  My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are falling, and he isn't a pledge of love, and I'm afraid he will look like us, and I don't believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process"--Main Street

Is indicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein descended from Mexican War general and U.S. President Zachary Taylor?

Last weekend was the Salsa on St. Clair Festival, and once again my neighbourhood was noisy.  I bought a drink of freshly-pressed sugar cane juice--it cost ten dollars, but you don't get that every day.

I was happy to get away to Crowdreads Saturday afternoon, where I recited a couple of American patriotic poems since it had been the Glorious Fourth two days earlier.  One was Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Grandmother's Story of Bunker Hill Battle"; the other was John Greenleaf Whittier's "Barbara Frietchie." The latter ends with these lines:

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave

Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw

Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down

On thy stars below in Frederick town!

I don't usually care for that flag- waving stars & stripes patriotism, but I like this ending!

On Quora.com there was a question, "What's the shortest sentence you can write with the greatest meaning?" I posted the answer, "I'm me."

At the memoir group we usually leave the canister with the subject cards in the librarian's office. Today the usual people weren't there and they had trouble finding it.  For a moment I was afraid that I'd taken it home and forgotten to bring it back! (Last week was cancelled by Dominion Day, and I sometimes bring it home at such times.) But it did turn up in the end.

Just last night I had a dream of a movie about people in Hollywood making a movie during World War II.  Someone was playing the piano piece "Alone" from Yoshinao Nakada's Japanese Festival album. (I played that album when I was young.) I've posted a link to that piece above.

Dull week

Another week has passed and I have hardly anything to write about!

I've almost finished reading through my collection of Classics Illustrated comics.  The other week I read their version of Jules Verne's Off on a Comet, which interested me simply because that was the issue cover they showed on the back cover of the comics, along with the list of all their titles in print.  The story itself is about some people on a section of the earth that gets broken off by a section of comet, and its orbit eventually takes them close to earth again and they get back by building a huge hot air balloon! (It requires some suspension of disbelief.) The only one I have left is another Verne comic, Tigers and Traitors, which used to come at the very end of their list.

I've also been reading through my collection of Classics Illustrated Junior fairy tales.  But with those I've started at the end of the series and gone backward. (I also have some from a special history series they did with subjects like the Civil War.)

Last night was the latest History Meetup.  Our subject was Australia, and since I knew the most about it--which isn't saying much--they put me in charge of the discussion.  I talked a bit about Australia as a frontier society, with characteristic income inequality and macho culture.

Tonight I discovered a Youtube channel called Let's Play, where an expert goes through old computer games with running commentary.  I've watched his treatment of the first half of that old favourite of mine, Kings Quest VII:  The Princeless Bride.  He doesn't enjoy it as much as I did, but that isn't important.

I've been over a month behind in blogging my 2004 diary entries (it goes back to me being sick earlier this year), so I've started posting them two daily entries at a time twice a day, making for four entries a day.  When I'm up to it, that is.

I've been watching quite a few Youtube videos about swales and berms.  A swale being a ditch you dig along the contours of a sloping field, and a berm the raised earth you build up just downhill for it.  It's very useful for planting trees and restoring deforested land.  I've also been watching clips about slopes terraced for farming, like at Machu Picchu.  Anyone who builds swales and berms and terraces has my admiration.

My favorite record album titles

"She discovered that, despite the enthusiastic young writers, the drama was not half so native and close to the soil as motor cars and telephones.  She discovered that simple arts required sophisticated training.  She discovered that to produce one perfect stage-picture would be as difficult as to turn all of Gopher Prairie into a Georgian garden"--Main Street

The part of Main Street dealing with Carol's ill-fated attempts to stage a local play is really funny!

On Twitter last week there was a really heated discussion of Israel that crowded out the rest of my notification feed!  I ended up muting a few people, something I normally avoid. (Muting isn't the same as blocking, it just means I don't get notified of their posts.)

The other day I started a Twitter thread asking people what their favorite record album titles were.  Other tweeters mentioned the Mothers of Invention's Weasels Ripped My Flesh, Caravan's For Girls Who Go Plump in the Knight, The Cum Drops' Balls Out and Other Acts of Freakery, and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols.

Now here's my list of favorite album titles, including a few I've just thought of now. (Of course, this has nothing to do with the contents of these albums, most of which I haven't heard.)

Bob Newhart, Button Down Mind

Bill Cosby, Wonderfulness

The Rolling Stones, Goat's Head Soup (not so much that I like that title, but I have to admit it's original!)

Miles Davis, Bitches' Brew

Ted Nugent, Scream Dream

Van Halen, Women and Children First and (read it slowly) OU812

Reo Speedwagon, Hi Infidelity

Oh No, It's Devo!

Elton John, Too Low For Zero

The Police, Synchronicity

Styx, Kilroy Was Here

Foreigner, Agent Provocateur

Wynton Marsalis, Hothouse Flowers

Wham!, Music From the Edge of Heaven

Peter Gabriel, So

Kate Bush, The Hounds of Love

Joe Walsh, Got Any Gum? (I like the sheer goofiness of that title)

Tom Jones, The Lead and How to Swing It

Iggy Pop, Naughty Little Doggie

LONGSTREET

"She was like the revolutionist at fifty:  not afraid of death, but bored by the probability of bad steaks and bad breaths and sitting up all night on windy barricades"--Main Street

What am I watching on Youtube these days? (I refuse to spell it "YouTube"!) The 1971 TV series Longstreet, about a blind detective in New Orleans. (It requires some suspension of disbelief...) 

The show's as much about Mike Longstreet's PTSD struggles and his need to be a big achiever as about the insurance investigation mysteries he solves. He hires Bruce Lee--yes, that Bruce Lee!--to teach him martial arts. There's an episode or two where a tough guy attacks him but he turns the tables by putting out the light!  The bomb that was meant to kill him only killed his wife and blinded him, so he clearly has a "survivor's guilt" issue. (Back when I was little I remember seeing a promo for the pilot  episode with this really sad scene where he's in the hospital after the explosion, his eyes bandaged, and he jumps out of his bed and makes a scene, drawing in a crowd of orderlies.) 

The show was developed by Stirling Silliphant, who won an Oscar for his In the Heat of the Night script but ended up writing disaster movies for Irwin Allen.  The TV networks in 1971 were making a belated effort to look "relevant" in the wake of '60s social change, and even the unsuccessful shows back then tend to sound more interesting than most of the stuff on today's broadcast networks.  This one lasted just one season because the too similar hit Ironside, with Raymond Burr as the crippled detective, got moved to the same time slot.

But I find it a remarkably good show, more mature than the usual middlebrow detective fare.  I saw a few Youtube episodes of it a few years back before the copyright police removed it, and I hope I can see the rest of it before it gets removed again.  James Franciscus was hardly the biggest talent around, but he has his best role here.

Just today I saw a particularly good episode, despite using the voiceover flashback cliche too much.  Mike goes undercover to investigate robberies at an electronics plant, getting hired through a program the factory started for hiring handicapped people and living in a group home with other "differently abled" hirees.  The robberies have all been accompanied by distracting sabotage explosions in areas where the hirees work, putting them under suspicion and the program in danger of cancellation.  (Spoiler:  it turns out to be the work of the woman supervising the hirees!)

As I said, the show's about Mike dealing with his handicap and his need to excel.  In an early scene his supervisor warns him, "You're out if you can't cut it," and he says, "I'll cut it." (That could be Mike's motto!) He has a hard time getting friendly with the other hirees in the home, partly because of the investigation but also because, as he admits, he's in a bit of denial about being handicapped himself.  At the end, when they thank him for solving the case and saving the program, he refers to the handicapped as "us," a step forward for him.

This got me thinking about my Asperger's Syndrome.  I don't like to think of myself as autistic, since my problems pale next to what low-functioning autistics have to deal with.  But maybe I should think of autistics as "us" too!

WOMAN REBEL: THE MARGARET SANGER STORY

"You mention the word 'co-operative' to the merchants and they'll lynch you!  The one thing they fear more than mail-order houses is that farmers' co-operative movements may get started"--Main Street

I'm now reading the graphic book Woman Rebel:  The Margaret Sanger Story (by Peter Bagge, who also did Credo about Rose Wilder Lane). What a hero she was!  Birth control is something we take for granted today, but we can do that because people like her took on the Roman Catholic Church and the United States government, and never gave up.

I've started translating a new Korean picture book. (This one's actually a Tolstoy story.)

Yesterday at Crowdreads, the question was "Do you need money to do what you love?" Well, it depends on what you love doing, doesn't it?  I couldn't resist mentioning a Julia Phillips line from You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again that people either see money as lifeblood, to nourish; as seeds, to grow things with; or as shit, to get rid of. And I read a bit more from Main Street about Carol trying to decide what to do with her life.

Did I mention that Main Street is great?  Here's another quote, on the grain elevator wheat buyer and his wife.

This was their philosophy complete... in the era of aeroplanes and syndicalism:

The Baptist Church (and, somewhat less, the Methodist, Congregational, and Presbyterian Churches) is the perfect, the divinely ordained standard in music, oratory, philanthropy, and ethics. 'We don't need all this newfangled science, or this terrible Higher Criticism that's ruining our young men in colleges.  What we need is to get back to the true Word of God, and a good sound belief in hell, like we used to have it preached to us.'

The Republican Party, the Grand Old Party of Blaine and McKinley, is the agent of the Lord and of the Baptist Church in temporal affairs.

All socialists ought to be hanged.

'Harold Bell Wright is a lovely writer, and he teaches such good morals in his novels, and folks say he's made prett' near a million dollars out of 'em.'

People who make more than ten thousand a year or less than eight hundred are wicked.

Europeans are still wickeder.

It doesn't hurt any to drink a glass of beer on a warm day, but anybody who touches wine is headed straight for hell.

Virgins are not so virginal as they used to be.

Nobody needs drug-store ice cream; pie is good enough for anybody.

The farmers want too much for their wheat.

The owners of the elevator-company expect too much for the salaries they pay.  

There would be no more trouble or discontent in the world if everybody worked as hard as Pa did when he cleared our first farm.

I think I recognize this America! (The age of Trumpism isn't so different...)

June is busting out all over...

"Ensued a fifteen-minute argument about the oldest topic in the world:  It's art but is it pretty?"--Main Street

Today I finally finished planting the seeds in our garden (carrots, beans, peas, kale). I would have done it Sunday but I mowed the lawn instead.  It was late this year, but it'll be early in the years to come!

Saturday I joined my singing group for a front-porch concert as part of a big fundraiser in Carolyn's neighborhood on Monarch Park Avenue.  Then I went to Crowdreads where we discussed sports. (I've been hearing noisy Raptors fans in my own neighborhood lately.) 

I read the opening pages of Main Street, which is a really sharp satire!  The joke is on the city-slicker heroine as much as the parochials.

Sunday was the Classic Book Club, where we discussed Brave New World. (Jane hated it!) Once again, over twenty people said they were coming but only five showed up.

On Youtube lately I've been watching cartoons with Ludwig von Drake, whom I liked on The Wonderful World of Disney long ago.  Paul Frees was a great cartoon voice actor! (He did Boris Badenov too.) I remember watching the last minutes of Hymn Sing while waiting for Disney to come on, then the first commercial after the closing credits would be for the latest Disney movie release.

Last week I dreamed of Robert Mitchum in the film noir Out of the Past.