Don't Ask

I have this fantasy of "filling the holes" in my education. For example, recently I audited a seminar on Augustine's  Confessions. Which has led me to a biography of Augustine. Last night I read about the Sack of Rome. It percolated into my dreams.

This morning I thought I'd sharpen a few pencils before I began "work." I thought I'd read about the Sack of Rome. Naturally the Wiki entry is chock full of hyperlinks.

In 410 Rome was not the capital of the Roman Empire any more. Mediolanum (link) was: the city "in the middle of the plain"; ie Milan. I had no idea. Long reading about Milan in the first four centuries of our era. Link to

1) the Arian Controversy, named after a, it appears, divisive theologian called Arius. I resist the temptation to click on the Arius link, though really I'd like to know Arius's connection, if any, to a more recent Arian controversy. I don't resist the link to

2) the Council of Nicaea (325). Am I reading? No, I'm just skimming froth off the top of the pot (to tap a metaphor, which could lead to an exploration of metaphor as illumination / obfuscation /shortcut to things we can't otherwise kid ourselves we understand, but I won't go there...it's really murky territory...)

 The First Countil of Nicaea must have been fascinating, I'm thinking, reading about a couple dozen bishops arguing, with citations from Holy Writ, round a big seminar table about whether God the father preceded or came after God the son--the bishops came to blows, literally, and for a moment I expect to find a link to a YouTube of something like Wendy Murdoch throwing pies in court.

If I don't scatter a few crumbs in this forest I'm going to get completely lost. I'll never find my way back to the Sack of Rome. But how to understand the SR without all this context? This is how Tristram Shandy took so long to get born.

I'm reminded of our neighbour in the Vaucluse. Brigitte spent her evenings darning her son's socks by a frugal light. She was proud of her handiwork--socks that were more darn than sock. I'm not sure what this has to do with the above, but I feel it is relevant. Somehow.

Futbol

The sky is a cloudless blue this morning: it looks as artificial as the surface of a Jeff Koons balloon dog. Two nights ago we woke up to puddles of rain on the carport roof, outside the bedroom, and a damp deck out front. Unusual at this time of year.

The campus has filled with high school students doing academics and sports of various sorts--huge, colourful contingent of futbol (lovely word, can we keep it, to replace "soccer"?) players. I watched the second half of the U.S.-Germany game yesterday at the gym, an exercise in defense, I think, but with a good outcome; it will keep the U.S. interested in the next World Cup round. In many ways a more fun event than the Olympics--maybe that has something to do with Brazil? But also with the way "little" countries get star-billing? The Olympics are dead serious, the World Cup has sprezzatura, lightness, comedy. It's Hamlet against MNDream.

The TLS of 13th June has a poem by CK Williams, "Bark," (death as a friendly old dog) which is, as usual, crafty, but also a departure from CKW's usual syntax in the way it jams phrases together without the linking strategies of conventional English syntax, and yet makes perfect emotional and esthetic sense. Very different in many ways from the deconstructions of an Ashbery poem in the last (?) New Yorker. Ashbery is playful, CKW, fundamentally, isn't. CKW is the Olympics, Ashbery is futbol. I might be getting carried away.

Keywords:

• Ashbery
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• CK Williams
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• World Cup

Memory

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Strange how the mind can rummage through its drawers and pull up a memory with all its sense detail from the layers of things stored there. I suppose one day, soon, we'll know how this works. Perhaps we'll be able to erase things: exercise selective amnesia. Neuroscientists are already playing with such possibilities, at least in animals.

I've been reading a book by the (East) German writer, Christa Wolf. I didn't know her work until recently when a friend who lives in eastern France suggested I read her. The book I'm reading is City of Angels,about a year-long residency in Los Angeles, and her anxiety about collaboration with the East German police, an episode she had completely forgotten and which was widely publicised when the archives were opened after German reunification. I believe it is the last book published before her death in (I think) 2011, but a novella August has just been published, post-humously, by Seagull Books.

Nothing much

My daughter, who is visiting from London, and I were taking a lunch break for "silky tofu." She was working on her tan and a feature on imagination for New Scientist and I'd been translating Valéry's  M. Teste and tinkering with poems all morning. "I'll make a salad," I said, "to go with your tofu." It was a recipe she'd made for me in London in February and I was keen to see how she did it.

My daughter, like my husband, who is from Marseilles originally, has a much more casual attitude to time than I do. "OK," she said, pulling a t-shirt on and hunting for her flipflops, "I'll just walk over to the student garden and get some mint." 

When she came back I'd finished reading the Times front section, so I started on the soccer/football while she chopped ginger and added honey to soy sauce (I have the recipe on a post-it). It seemed France was pulling up its soccer socks, and the US might make it to the second round. But England wasn't doing so well. The sports section was all in colour: red yellow green blue, macaw, Apollinaire would have said. Easy to understand how people get excited about the game, even without watching it and the Americans seem to have completely stopped tsk-tsking about organisational problems and unfinished stadiums and transportation systems and given in to the sheer pleasure of Brazilian panache. The rest of the paper was in black and white...

The tofu was delicious and I forget what else I meant to say.

Keywords:

• world cup and tofu daughters

Here we go again?

Last night pedalling away at the gym I watched CNN and caught part of a Tom Hanks documentary on the 60s, Vietnam War chapter. It was made for the present situation in Iraq (I hedge) in many ways. First we (I say "we" though I'm not a US citizen, but it feels "we" from California) send in a few hundred "military advisors" who aren't going to "fight" (= shoot it out?), just test the waters, check out the situation.

Soon (I hope not and I assume that Obama hopes not too, but Kennedy and LBJ weren't great boosters of the Vietnam War either, in their private journals) the military advisors beget more "military advisors," then bombs, then "boots on the ground" napalming villages. Meanwhile the villagers "melt" into the jungle and...well you get the picture. It was chilling.

I was still listening/watching from the mats, when a woman asked if she could switch to Fox News. I mumbled something about hating Fox News, but said I was leaving anyway--not a discussion I really wanted to engage--and she said, well she hated CNN and we must "respect our differences." Must we?  I'm not so sure. 

Keywords:

• Iraq
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• Vietnam

The Insomniac (5 and final?)

This week was the 6th and last meeting of my Sleep Clinic, or CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). Nice group of people: wouldn't say we "bonded" (sorry), but we began to nod in agreement  at other peoples' comments; for example, when someone said that even one bad night was too much. A diverse group, Asians and Caucasions from various countries, with various accents, equally divided between men and women, some who go to bed at 9 pm and get up at 2, others who go to bed at 2 am and get up at 6, if they manage to sleep that long. All of us quietly desperate about disfunctional sleep patterns.

I don't want to jinx anything but I think I'm sleeping better. The trick is to spend less time in bed. No more turning in at 11 on the dot and praying to get 8 hours sleep by spending 10 hours tossing and turning. Initially allowed 7 hours in bed (which led to the discovery--after all these years--that with 6.5 hours sleep I function just fine), I have been increased, in 2-15 minute increments, to 7.5 hours in bed, and most nights get 6.5 hours of rest. It is an interesting experiment. We now become part of the data. 

Off to the Sierras this afternoon with SF son and daughter visiting from London (a journalist at New Scientist, here for a conference in Sacramento on something environmental). We're going to spend two days hiking in the Desolation Wilderness. I've been tending blisters on my heels, acquired last Sunday climbing to the Stanford Dish Trail in +90 degree heat with no socks in my sneakers. Did I say "stupidly"? Make that "stupidly acquired." Searching for blister cures I discovered veteran backpackers recommend wrapping your heels in nice silvery, frictionless duct tape. You wrap a few feet of the stuff around your water bottle just in case. I found duct tape in the hall closet.

I wanted to say something about Geoffrey Hill, but don't see how to segue from duct tape to a lyric by Geoffrey Hill. There's a lesson there, because he could do that without blinking. Anyway, this is getting too long. First rule of blogging: keep it short.

Keywords:

• Desolation Wilderness
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• Geoffrey Hill
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• Insomnia Clinic
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• Stanford

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The Insomniac, or Polishing the Teapot (4)

Week 4/6 in the Stanford Sleep Clinic Insomnia Workshop.

It's been up and down. Some days I think all this attention to sleep patterns (keeping a sleep diary, for example), not to mention my innate (it seems) wish to  meet the teachers' expectations, makes things worse, not better. My old problem is waking up in the middle of the night, not really falling asleep, except in crisis situations. But I've been crazily sleep-deprived, yet the minute I hit the pillow I'm electric.

So, as instructed, I get up, I try to do something calming. Turns out the most calming things, for me, are physical, not the obvious: reading. I empty the dishwasher, I do the ironing, I polish the old pewter teapot that has turned dull over years of neglect. Method for polishing a pewter teapot in the middle of the night, unplanned: take a Brillo Pad (thanks Andy Warhol) and scrub. Of course your hands will be a mess after, but since you still aren't sleepy you can spend some time massaging cream into them, and while you're at it, why not pamper your feet, those oriental objects of desire?

The teapot was a wedding present. There's a poem about it in my book White Sheets: when it looked like we were going to be spending more time in California we bundled it up and brought it over here, so we'd have a least a few familiar objects around. It has a nice shape: round but flattened, like a curling stone. I have now bought proper polish and some very fine steel wool and it glows on the kitchen counter. It has a history, it has a pleasing shape, it is mute but it speaks to me.

What was I getting at? The reason I'm writing all this is that last night I slept straight through, seven hours, so I'm feeling elated. I'm going to practice positive thinking all day long and maybe I can have two nights of good sleep in a row. Also this afternoon is the seminar on Augustine's Confessions,a highlight of the week, and I'll be awake enough to appreciate minds bouncing ideas off other minds.

Oh, and Downton Abbey: I've been rewatching Season 4 to relax before bed (yes, it's a whole system, I know how obsessive I am). What puzzles me is what Lady Crawley's role in the day-to-day running of the house is. Does she ever meet with the cook to discuss meals? It's hard to imagine the cook and Lady C sitting down together. It's hard to picture that scene, yet I'd really like to know the link between the kitchen scenes and the dining room scenes.

Keywords:

• Downton Abby
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• insomnia
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• Sleep Clinic
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• teapot

The Catalpa Tree

The NYTimes this morning has a story about catalpas and other out-of-fashion trees. It says the Catalpa Tree Appreciation Society is looking for members and I plan to sign up.

When we were living in the Paris suburbs I planted one of those huge square faux terracotta pots you find in garden centres with a little flame-like cyprus tree. The pot-with-tree sat on a flat roof outside our second-storey (or first, depending on whether you are North American or European) bedroom; the thought was for the cyprus to hide an ugly chimney, but I wasn't diligent and it died in early childhood.

The pot sat empty. Then one spring I spied a volunteer in the clayey dirt, a sprout with big juicy leaves like one of those avocadoes you grow on a kitchen ledge until eventually it's the avocado or the kitchen--you can't have both. The sprout put out more leaves, it thrived without much attention (like some children), and the leaves turned heart-shaped and big as dinner plates.

I had no idea what it was. There was an acacia in the yard, but it wasn't an acacia, and it definitely wasn't a yew tree, like the one that hung over the (neglected) compost heap, and it wasn't a maple--I'm Canadian, I know a maple tree when I see one. I liked this thing's independence. Water wasn't something I was about to provide: it had to be carried from the bathroom over a hardwood floor without spilling. The thing didn't seem to care if we went away for a month, or three.

Eventually I spotted a catalpa in a neighbour's garden and realised where my tree had come from. The flowers were beautiful, like wisteria. The seed pods were fun. I was glad I owned a catalpa. Growing up in British Columbia it didn't feel like part of my birthright. 

The tree was a teenager in tree-years when we sold the house and moved to a Paris apartment. We threw out a lot of stuff and left a lot more to the new owners, especially book shelves because they liked books. They stored our piano. They could use the Ikea bunk beds we no longer needed. We felt lucky to have them taking over the house with their two little girls.

But somehow I couldn't abandon the catalpa, in its big, ugly, by now really obviously faux, terracotta pot. There was a tiny back porch off the kitchen in the Paris apartment. The big, ugly etc. took up half the space. Now I could water it, watch the leaves flutter on a daily basis, wait for the flowers with which I was sure it would one day honour us. I bought a canvas director's chair for the other corner of the porch and in the evening I sat in it with a shot of scotch and watched my catalpa. I could even look up, four floors from the street, and admire it, the one plant on a stack of tiny concrete back porches, meant to house mops and buckets and brooms and serpillieres. 

One hot summer when we were away in California for my husband's work the catalpa died. I was sad. I tried to replace it, in the flower market on the Ile de la Cité where, between the Hotel Dieu and the market there are two rows of catalpas. Last autumn this was. No one had any catalpas for sale. I pointed out that there were six or eight planted in the pavement right next door. Yes, they said, and when they make seedlings we yank them out and throw them away. I settled for a little fluttery Mexican orange tree, but on my way home, trundling my bush behind me in a shopping cart, I broke some pods off the Hotel Dieu catalpa trees. 

And when I got home I planted them in the big, ugly faux terracotta pot.

Keywords:

• Catalpa Trees.