Friday treat
Serious Friday treat, blast from me past, secret guilty pleasure!
Yup, it’s Gardeners Question Time … even has archive, so you can hear repeats.
I loved the man who wanted to grow an olive tree. Man after my own heart, here chez the second floor mad poly tunnel..
Cabbagetown — some considering
As I said I am challenged reading Juan Butler’s Cabbagetown. Cabbagetown — a documentary attempts to be a novel that depicts a place.
The woman Terry, the newly acquired live-in girlfriend of Michael, the main narrator who is writing the diary, is straight out of the weakest Sears pattern. She would not survive a gust if the door blew open. A construction from a male fantasy via a microwave oven. Such a woman would not survive 13 mins in Cabbagetown. But Michael knows better than her everytime he blinks his eyelid, he’s taken her number, excepting her number is ridiculous even beyond the standards of the ridiculous. She’s meek, mousie, her solution to everything is to whimper and sob and all she wants is him, him, him. Except the dude is a complete loser. He’s not uninteresting within that, but certainly not alluring. She lives her life in terror that he’ll throw her out of this miniscule rooming house they share or have shared for, a matter of days or weeks.
Women are always afraid to be alone in such male constructions. Yet ten minutes earlier she was practically living on the street. I remain perplexed as to why the gritty urban male writer immediately vaporizes when his pen approaches a woman. I’ve noticed this in novels published here in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s and wonder how can this be? Do/did they not know any women?
Given the entire novel is constructed around this dotty relationship through which we learn of place Cabbagetown this is trying on the nerves, but I muster on.
There’s several things that interest me about the book. The first is the depiction of people living on top of each other. The landlady lives above or in the same rooming house as the main narrator and he feels constantly watched by her and he constantly watches/remarks on her. This cramping of human space and lives into and inside lives is interesting.
There’s a section where Michael and Terry go to Bloor/Yonge Street. There’s this real sense they are visiting from Cabbagetown like a pair of aliens and this distance between the peoples in a city also interested me. That you can shift neighbourhood and feel like a visitor or a guest or be immediately displaced. Outside within per se.
Another aspect that works rather well is this character George who gives Michael books to read. One thing that’s noticeable in this book is the people are reading. George is some kind of earnest activist trying to plot an uprising in Cabbagetown of “direct action” intentions. He hands a manual on manufacturing terrorist materials to Michael to read and then asks his opinion on whether it would work in Cabbagetown. I like how he earnest but not of it, consults the man who is of the place on whether it would succeed. Again it’s within but not within. The other thing that works rather well are the reactions to George from the other residents of Cabbagetown. George also is the reason Michael writes the book since he encouraged him and told him he talked well and would write well. Michael, of course, needs permission from George to write. This is clear.
There’s also a rabid homophobia that the writer cleverly turns on its head. I have to go back to the book and add the parts here that I am talking about.
Am reading a challenging book and concurrently faced my challenges on the tumble tramp ce soir.
There’s a very interesting dynamic and moment uniting two separate moves because as you’re doing them, your brain, if its too engaged, becomes aware that they are happening and throws them off. You can actually tell half way through, flying through the air what the outcome will be. It’s entirely different if you compute it only through physical muscles. Then you’re astonished you arrived at all because there is no mid air analysis.
The brain is a dreaded interference in such matters. This is so much more noticeable in adults than children.
There are a number of misconceptions about gymnastics as an adult sport. That it is “girly” and unnatural. Not true. The women are incredibly strong, if anything built like hockey players. You need incredible strength in your shoulders to lift your body weight and hold it for prolonged periods of time. Also, legs, solid ones, aide matters. It’s a sport that demands serious physical power and pound. It becomes the most fascinating to watch someone who has never attempted the sport learn it as an adult from the beginning. It is there you observe the fundamental differences in male and female bodies. How difficult a move may be for the male body, whereas the women have no problem. Moves like a simple cartwheel cause trouble for men. They dive onto both hands, instead of a 1,2,3,4 placement and rotation is difficult in the hips. It’s a sport of exchange and inquiry and there’s incredible support between all the people who train together irregardless of your ability. Everything you achieve is charted and cheered by neighbouring eyes. And it never ceases to remind me of sentences.
Words tattooed on the body are curious, more so to me than pictures or images which are so much busier. But what would you decide on? Latest ones I’ve clocked were:
Torres (male upper arm down to elbow, Cream (woman band around arm above elbow), and another that was something to do with Philip Larkin but has gone away on the wind.
I was just thinking on the way home, what if that frustrated man from yesterday actually went home and did himself in, and how the human voice can sometimes not find sufficient or precise language to be persuasive. Then I had a gasp of a thought that those words I said, which flew out of me like heat from the oven, could have been the last thing he heard and how mum-ish they were … and then I calmed down and remembered that he was surrounded by other people, all of whom ignored him and let him rave away to himself and that possibly weak words may not be as disregarding as no words whatsoever.
And then I disagreed with myself on that.
And decided humans should be capable of better words in the midst of raging rowers.
At the last reckoning it’s still a bit of a toss up.
But I am still coming down on the side of doing a practical rowing intervention next time. Take man to the rowing machine, request person on rowing machine get off and then run away without further explanation. I think the situation was solve able, it would require initiative in the art of de-fusing.
Yesterday evening a man was very frustrated on a bicycle beside me about a rowing machine. I attempted to calm his agitation since he was effin and blinding in my sweaty ear. He replied to my mild suggestion that he consult staff about his agitation that he might as well go home and commit suicide. He took off a toute vitesse and my trail of “don’t say such a thing” uttered, tripping at 5.7 miles an hour was lost and ineffectual.
It was a very extreme reaction to an impediment with rowing. But somehow I wasn’t quite ready and able to respond to it.
The worst of it was there was a woman working in the facility who is the most helpful person on the planet, but she was round the corner and didn’t witness his outburst.
Is it my imagination but are the most helpful women in the world regularly called Mary?