Paaaarty!
Those Romans apparently knew how to party. Perhaps that was the key to their rise and fall. In this case, they honored the goddess Flora with “excessive merriment, drinking, and lascivious games”. They said it was about protecting the blossoms from hail etc., but it sounds to me like an excuse for proto-spring break.
Hunting the bookshelf Saturday evening for something different to read, I stumbled across the translated correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem.
Benjamin and Scholem were Jewish scholars, and their collected correspondence is apparently something of an epistolary classic.
The two were Jewish intellectuals of some prominence, and the correspondence documents their lives in the decade before World War II. Sholem had moved to Palestine, while Benjamin lived a life of itinerant, scholarly poverty, wandering Europe in those dark days – especially dark for a Jew – leading up to World War II. From a Benjamin letter, written from Berlin in February 1933 (this is a month after Hitler became chancellor).
The little composure that people in my circles were able to muster in the face of the new regime was rapidly spent, and one realizes that the air is hardly fit to breathe anymore – a condition which of course loses significance as one is being strangled anyway.
I know little about their scholarship, but the discussions of the rise of Naziism – often made with chilling subtlety – are deeply moving. There’s also a bit of dark comedy, as Benjamin spends significant time in almost every letter complaining about his impecunious state:
I sit here with dark thoughts indeed as I watch all my attempts even to scratch together the bare minimum – at the very least to settle my bill – go awry, because events at Berlin Radio have completely robbed me of the income I could always rely on.
Must learn more about Kabbalah and the work Benjamin and Scholem were doing.
“Only in Albuquerque,” Lissa said.
The local outlet for Lafarge, the international rock, concrete and aggregate vendor, had an open house this afternoon. It was a delight. They were barbecueing hamburgers and hot dogs, and had some guy making balloon animals for the kids. One of the local radio stations was doing remotes. From a rock and gravel yard. We wandered the yard, checking out the crushed stone for L’s latest garden project, and L got a free soda. Such a deal! And they’ll likely have sold us some rock, though that would have happened anyway. We like their rock.
Mark April 25 as the Day of First Robin, spotted in the bit of garden out front we call the “mountain meadow”. He didn’t seem to mind my presence, just hopped around as I walked up the drive past him. Must procure digital camera to better document events such as this.
Happy Anzac Day to all my antipodean readers. (Though given the Gallipoli angle, “happy” may not quite strike the right note).
Consider the bread mold.
Two sitings yesterday of old bird friends.
The first was on the bike path, along the flood control channel next to the freeway interchange. It’s about the least natural setting you can imagine, pretty much concrete as far as the eye can see, speeding cars and parking lots. But because of people wasting water when they water their lawns or whatever, there’s a steady flow of water in the concrete-lined channel, and soil tries to build up down at the bottom, and grasses relentlessly grow, creating a little wetland until they come by with the heavy equipment to “clean it up” every year. And every spring the killdeers return to this little stretch of bike path. Saw my first one yesterday morning. The killdeer looks very much to me like a shore bird, and I always see it on the concrete slopes above my lttle wetland, though Sibley tells me it’s a plover “found in upland habitats often far from water.”
The second siting was the first of our returning hummers, which Lissa quickly and authoritatively identified as the male black-chinned. Lissa is much better at the naming of these things because she is a much more visual person, and a better observer. I’m fascinated by knowing the names, but I need her to keep pointing out which is which. In this case, the black-chinned has, well, a black chin, though that would not help distinguish him from the male Ruby-throated, which also has a blackish chin. That distinction is pure geography – we’re not likely to have the ruby-throated here.
We know it’s the same hummer, because after returning all the way from Central America, he heads straight for our obscurely hidden feeder on the front porch. Though whether it’s really one or many I can’t tell. They all look alike to me, especially without my glasses.
By a complication of her incredibly busy life, Nora was not able to make it to the awarding of her freshman year academic letter, which she had earned by virtue of her being smart and working hard in school and all.
It was a tricky parental moment. We really wanted her to go, so we could bust with pride while she walked across the gym floor. Lissa really wanted it. But Nora’s on the stage crew for their performance of Othello, and tonight was the final dress rehearsal. That was for her a no-brainer – of course she would go to the theater. So Lissa and I went and sat in the audience while Nora did not walk up to accept her academic letter. We were still busting proud, and got to applaud a bunch of her friends. And afterwards we went up and grabbed her letter for her and it was all fine.
The seniors who had earned an academic letter all four years got to pick their most influential teacher. They each gave a little speech explaining their choice, and they had little gifts and flowers for the teachers, and it was about the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.
Hmmm. I thought a glider was sorta, by definition, a flying thing without a motor.
Tried riding my bike to work today. It worked fine.
My main worry was that I would stink and offend my coworkers, but that problem seems alleviated by just riding gently on the way in. No sweat.
I’ve wanted for a while to ride to work. My morning ride often takes me out a trail that ends up about half a mile from my office. Then I turn around, ride home, and drdive a car back to the office. Showers were always the holdup. But there were too many positives not to try it, most significantly the time not lost to sitting in my car. It’s never been a bad commute, just 15 minutes each way, but it always seems like 15 wasted minutes. Time in the car traded for time on the bike seems like a good deal.
I didn’t take my go-fast bike, opting instead to put town tires on my old mountain bike. I didn’t fancy worrying about the nice bike out on the bike rack in the parking lot at work. I also invested in a good lock. By my calculation, I’ll have to ride 30 or 40 times this year to amortize the money I sunk into the tires and lock. (Of course I sprung for the nice armadillo kevlar thorn-proof tires and slime tubes. This is Goathead City.)
I can’t do it every day. Some days I need my car for work. But on days when I don’t riding seems like an option.
