The tomato plants are in — just in the nick of time according to Mme Beespeaker’s instruction on planting this weekend. Also the marigold looks distressed, but the brocolli content. The lettuces are over, except the one who remained in the Greenhouse. (do not imagine any impressive structure, glorified carrier bag)
My gardening assistant took his raking so seriously and accused me of nonchalance!
All the plots around ours are so much more advanced, I am nursing a degree of sadness over my inability to get prepped for today’s planting, but the challenges have been many including too little time, weather conditions, illness and general mayhem. But the thing with the garden is you have to put in, to pull out. But there’s so much joy over there and I love to spend time puzzling out why nothing is growing or puzzling out why is that particular thing growing when I never put it in there … and there’s the delight in what everyone else around me manages. Philip was out today and his garden is such a delight, and it’s always so abundant. I hope his arugula plant will return this year in my plot. It’s vaguely there, but may have been raked over in today’s co-operative venture.
River forecasting, weather vain as gaeilge
Am developing quite a “river forecasting centre” habit.
I noticed today when we were watching the nuacht le cheile on TG4 that they have an aimsir feature on the homepage. Very high tech. And central to the eye. They have their priorities right as Gaeilge. I note that the Nuacht always includes several arts stories that would never show up in the Six-One english equivalent. Why is this? Abair liomsa le do thoil?
Ding? Cad e do baruil?
Last night as I was pondering a long stretch with a German dictionary to quell my curiousity over Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s Fragments of a physicist (not the precise title) I discovered the text, I was after, was actually right beneath my fingertips (unbeknownst).
It pays to scroll.
I had learnt from a Ritter academic that the prologue text I sought was not translated and I’d have to attempt to read it in German (the same way people Attempt Everest).
Strangely I had the identical experience trying to find out the hockey score yesterday. The match was on, the city was watching and yet I could not find out the score. I clicked the stream feature on the CBC and was watching two mysterious men chatting on the telephone instead of blokes flying about bashing each other. Finally I called up my beloved who was watching the match with my first born. What’s the score? Says I defeated. I have no idea why I wanted to know the score since I am technically not that interested in this round of hockey, but … when my curiosity is piqued …
Extraordinary footage of Tornado weather event in Missouri. The audio of the Tornado beggars belief. The sound on this piece is quite something.
Yesterday I read a number of pieces of literary criticism. Two of the pieces I read concerned memoirs. Each piece commenced with a three paragraph introduction asking and discussing the question: what was the point of memoirs?
Both pieces appeared in the same publication. That the writers both began from the same position of inquiry and justification caused me to wonder if its not time to declare that we are living in the post-memoir-befuddlement era. They’ve been around about as long as goats have, so rather than wrestle with whether they should be around it could be more timely to talk about what new and revealing ways (if any) they are presently around and floating past us.
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Curiously in reference to the aforementioned mem-justo-fication (or should that be fixation?) I was saddened not to be able to take in this week’s screening of On The Bowery here in Vancouver. I had been so looking forward to it, but I was able to view it on the small screen. The film intersperses actual documentary scenes from the Bowery with slices of a fictional drama. The drama extends from those scenes, so the actual life gives rise to a fictionalized departure from it. The documentary scenes, I found, very affecting, (the drama has an endearing stiff, mannered quality) perhaps because I have read so much about the place at that time or perhaps because 60 years later the same scenes are played out in most cities, except crack (in comparison) doesn’t afford even the minor dignity that being a street drinker did. Those scenes with men splayed out, obliterated mid thought or sentence on the street and then rolled over and moved up and on are like a marker to compare to now. I was thinking watching them how tame they seemed and how much further addiction and poverty have and continue to diminish people. And the obvious question is how much worse is it going to get?
I also watched Nettie Wild’s documentary Fix: The story of an Addicted City this week and was reminded how hard people worked and advocated and fought for the Safe Injection site, how much progress has been made through it and how a bunch of morons (Harper’s Conservative govt) who have no willingness to examine the issue without their moral harnesses and presumptions are this week trying to roll things back to a time pre-even-that documentary. Inconceivable and yet there it is. The documentary stands as one testament/testimony and the live coverage from the court another, a fresh contradiction. We don’t listen/We don’t learn/
My favourite headline today, as ever from one of my preferred news sources Channel 4
World fails to end.
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Thematically it perfectly matches my own current medical malady, which has concurrently failed to end and has confounded me and my favourite medic. One thing guaranteed with middle age is confidence that the body can only fail better in the future.