lookfar

LJ wants me to spend the princely sum of $17 per year ("Pro Package") to post more photos. I'm okay with that, except every time I try to give them my Visa card, I get a "transaction failed" message. Is this happening to anyone else? Damn Russians! No wonder they can't win their war.

I went through and cleared up my friends list, taking people who no longer keep a journal or whom I couldn't remember. Better to know who is in the room! If I removed you and you'd like to be friended, please comment here.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Good Place. Here at the Far Pavilion, we have admired all of these TV shows, but I didn't notice the common ingredient until B99; they are all Michael Shur. What they all have in common: everyone, everyone in the community gets to belong eventually, whether it's a workplace or the afterlife. Even the asshole is in some way a member of the band, and everyone is cherished for his eccentricities and allowed to both hug and learn, to paraphrase the creators of Seinfeld on what they wanted to avoid.



What's noteworthy, to my mind, is the gentle inclusiveness that never relies on family ties (a common 1980s sitcom trope) to provide community.



Honora and I have both noticed the Michael Shur effect, and we see it in our current show, Our Flag Means Death. Everyone, even the most incompetent pirate, is loved and part of the community, and even the Designated Villain gets a sort of "he can't help it, he's effed up" sort of pass. Why, I wonder, is this kind of very gentle, inclusive, dreamy sort of comedy so popular now? I think about the groundbreaking All in the Family or Sanford and Son in the 1970s, that went so sarcastically hard at their characters; all assholes were clearly assholes.

Has the world become so terrifying and community bonds so fragile that this is what we really need when we settle down on the couch - to temporarily inhabit a world that promises to hold and cherish us, even outside the family? I think so.

Some of it I gather from Honora's fannishness, which has always been more intense than mine. I look at her friends - half of them under - or un-employed and still living with their parents at 26 - and I see a whole coterie of fragile young people who don't seem to feel that the world has a reasonable place for them. Maybe it's the internet, that 24-hour-a-day horror show, or maybe it's the reality of climate change or the falling standard of living guaranteeing that you will never attain the lifestyle you had at 12, but they seem to long for a safe place to be.

Maybe Michael-Shur-ville is it.

I didn't have work till noon, and for once I'd had a good night's sleep, so I did Bikram for half an hour. I like this yoga method, broken up by drinking coffee, checking on the internet and taking care of things I can see in the the kitchen.

One thing I did was go out with clippers and cut the flowers offered me by my second-best lilac, Lil Rascal. These don't smell as great; in fact, I'm not completely sure she is a lilac, but probably she is, because she looks much like Miss Kim, who came with a plastic tag that identified her as a miniature lilac.



Honora came in last night while I was still in the guest room and we experimented with downloading my file of laptop backgrounds to use as Zoom backgrounds:





I worked from 12-2, then quick lunch, then 2:30 to 5:30, then had a Zoom Happy Hour with my brothers and my sister-in-law Karen:





Toby participated but then left to sit on the other couch because he was overwhelmed by the shouting. Karen is Like Us, but Toby is Not Like Us, which is why I like him.

Dinner was Toby's specialty (so I say), bacon and onion smothered pork chops. He made this once a few months ago and I was OH BABy. Honora ate eggs upstairs, where her Shakespeare group was doing a reading.

Some newly observed pandemic phenomena:

- On the median over by the Home Depot a few days ago, I saw a guy begging with a paper cup on a selfie stick. He'd extend his cup to your car window if you waved a bill, I guess.

- On the street where we live - on which my window faces - an Amazon Prime truck, grey with the Amazon smile logo, stopped and put on its blinkers. Soon a second, identical, truck stopped right behind it in the parking lane. The two drivers, both African-American women, got out, and the front one went to talk to the back one. Then she opened up the back of her van and took out a big yellow Tyvek sack - packages, I suppose - and a green Tyvek sack as well, and there was some switching around. After a while, the front truck drove off. After another short while, yet a third Amazon Prime truck drove up next to Truck #2, and they had a short gam, while Truck #3 sat in the travel lane. Then they both drove off.

I found this mysterious and alluring.

- I really, really miss frozen yogurt from the frozen yogurt store, mostly because I can't have any.

- We've got five bags of stuff to go to the Goodwill store but I've been assuming that they are not taking donations. It appears I am wrong, so these bags will go out this weekend.

- Meanwhile, our president, who is a terrible person and an ignoramus, suggested that we might be able to conquer coronavirus by ingesting disinfectant, which shows that he has as much understanding of infection and disease as a not-too-bright sixth grader.



Not having to do with the pandemic, I think, but this afternoon I said to Toby, "Hey I had a funny dream that I found a back scratcher with some souvenir writing on it and I gave it to you."

"You did give it to me." He reached over and found the Cape Cod back scratcher on his book pile. "You found it when you cleaned out your drawer."

Should I be concerned that I no longer seem to know the difference between dreams and waking?

Toby and I went to see My Fair Lady at the Kennedy Center tonight; he got the tickets as a birthday present from his sister Ann and BiL Jeff.

So, you know the story of My Fair Lady, right? It's the musical version of Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, which is roughly based on the Greek myth, in which a sculptor, Pygmalion, makes a model of a woman so beautiful that he falls in love with her. The goddess Aphrodite takes pity on this hopeless love and brings the statue to life as the woman Galatea. Well, that's all we hear about Galatea; she came to life and was granted to Pygmalion. Shaw took issue with this perhaps, as a feminist and socialist. In his play, the linguist Henry Higgins, on a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, undertakes the education of a lower class flower-seller - a "guttersnipe" - and teaches her to speak like a lady. His transformation of her is so complete that he triumphs by passing her off as a princess in disguise at an embassy ball. It's a very funny play and I recommend the movie to you, so that you can swoon over Leslie Howard.

The musical contains great chunks of the play's dialogue, but as musicals must have a resolved romance by the last curtain, it chooses to play up the romantic feelings between the irritable, irascible and self-centered Higgins and Eliza Doolittle, his pupil/project. She falls in love with him in the middle of Act I ("I Could Have Danced All Night") when she begins to achieve her linguistic transformation ("The Rain in Spain"). And that so much makes sense, emotionally, because that experience, of someone who allows you to be the person you were meant to be - well, that is the feeling of falling in love, right?

In both the play and the musical, Higgins feels that Eliza is more or less his project and fails to acknowledge her as a feeling human being; that falls to Colonel Pickering and Higgins' housekeeper. But the play stays the course; Eliza triumphs at the embassy ball, stands up to Higgins for his failure to treat her with respect, and leaves him to marry Freddy, a rather silly young man she has met in her short career passing as a lady.

But the musical has her return to Higgins. After standing up to him, she goes off with Freddy. Higgins is surprised and distressed at his feelings at her absence - he sings "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face," which we understand to be the plaint of man unfamiliar with attachment and tenderness, minimizing his pain.

And then Eliza reappears. Apparently, Freddy is a no-go. Without any discussion of their relationship or his treatment of her going forward, she slips into his library and assumes her old position of bringing him his slippers. In true 1956 fashion, we are meant to understand that Eliza has worked out how to resist his bullying and therefore remain in relationship to the man she loves.

Oh, great. She's going to put up with his nonsense and protect his emotional ignorance and sacrifice her chance to be openly loved and appreciated, so she can carry slippers and provide secretarial services to this oversensitive emotional jerk. And this is the happy ending. It's amazing to me that it's taken sixty years for feminist criticism to catch up with this version of romantic love; the woman does ALL the emotional work for the privilege of being in a relationship with a man who, like King Lear, "hath ever slenderly known himself."

Strangely, I still really enjoyed the music and watching it. I'm just more than ever hopeful that the young women I know don't buy into this idea of a happy ever after.

It's 6:20 a.m., one of my favorite times of day to be alone, especially if, as today, I was also up at 4:00 and went down to the porch to sleep. The sky was glowing, overcast behind the silhouettes of the trees, and even at 4 there was some traffic, but mostly the sound of crickets, thousands of crickets making themselves known as their lives draw to a close.

I didn't fall back to sleep, I think. Yesternight I went down to the porch at 3 and slept till 7. I was hoping for the same, but tonight I lazed about under the feather comforter, listening to crickets and drifting. Then I listened to Terrible Thanks for Asking until 6, and then got up to enjoy solitude and coffee. I have a doctor's appointment at 8:30, and work at noon, maybe a short run in between those, unless I'm really tired, in which case a short nap.

When I went to see Carlene this week, I brought her a dream to talk about. This is what I remember about the dream (it's written in a book upstairs that I don't want to go get):

I was at a music or art festival in Vienna, and there was a large, complicated fountain with spouts and little waterfalls, that was made for people to splash in. Lots of festival-goers, who were mostly people in their 20s, were swimming about, in their underwear or naked. I jumped in, too, maybe in my underwear or maybe fully clothed. I noticed that some of the people were closer to my age as well.

Then I was walking down a curved, old street in Vienna. The shops were painted black with gold lettering, and at a certain point it was a perfect photo, so I took out my phone, but then I had to walk backward a little because my forward progress had changed the relation of the street curves to each other and made a less-perfect photo.

A bit later on the same street, I saw that there was a huge, glittering spiderweb that stretched across the whole street. Not the classic radial design of Charlotte Cavatica, but a tangle of lines going in all directions, shaped something like a suspension bridge. As I watched, a very, very small flying squirrel slid down one of the lines, gilded by the sun. I brought my camera up to take its picture, but I couldn't locate it with the viewfinder or else it had already gone. I wondered if it was really a flying squirrel and thought that maybe it was a hummingbird. But I was pretty sure about the flying squirrel, even though it was just a glimpse.

As I told Carlene, I believe that I was dreaming about my soul.

Once or twice in our tenancy here, one of the cats has killed a flying squirrel. The first time it happened, I could hardly believe it; the thing was so tender and beautiful, with a face like a little otter and an odd, spatulate tail, with the hairs arranged in a chevron pattern, for gliding. But I was also utterly surprised that there were flying squirrels in my neighborhood. Where are they? No one I know here has ever seen one in the wild. So it is with the soul; it is something beautiful that belongs to you, and it is all around, maybe in the tree over your head right now, but it lives its own life and you will only rarely see it.

The thing is to cultivate the knowledge of it. Not even necessarily to know more about it, but to know OF it, to remember that it is somewhere nearby, and that it is a pearl of great price that you already own. And this is not so that you can produce or achieve something; it is only in the interest of remembering always the unseen world that surrounds you and inhabits you.

It is only possible to think about and discuss things like this as symbols; they are not reducible to definitions and facts.

Now a breeze is blowing dried leaves across the deck with a skittering sound. Next door, Tom and Amy's lights are on; they are getting their twins ready for preschool.

So this is where I am going right now, as I permit myself to focus on my inner development and let go of taking care of everyone else; I go to seek the pearl of great price.

It's been so peaceful to sit here in the quiet house and talk to you. Thank you for listening.







“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it." Matthew 13:45

I finished this book at 2:30 this morning. I knew I would like it very much, because I liked the movie, although, because I am a book person more than a movie person, I wish I had read the book first and maybe skipped the movie. It's more my own when I have populated a book with faces of my own devising, with settings that draw more on my own experiences.

The story is about Caroline, who lives with her father hidden in the Forest Park in Portland, Oregon - how they live in a cave dug in the ground and covered with ferns, how they have a lookout hidden by branches high in a tree, how he has taught her to walk on the stones placed among the woodland plants to avoid making a trail, to see outsiders and slip away, to eat what can be made on a Coleman stove with water from a stream and pack every scrap out, how to carry herself when they go into town to avoid attracting attention.

Here is the news story on which the book is based.

What happens to them? I won't tell you. Read this lovely novel.

Pandemic is a contemporary board game in which the players work cooperatively to wipe out four global diseases before they overwhelm humanity. Honora and Tristan came back from their 2016 road trip raving about this game that they had played in Seattle, so I bought it to bring on a Virginia beach trip last summer. The kids and I really liked it; Toby doesn’t like board games at all. I especially liked the cooperative aspect; I’m not a decent strategist, but Honora, who can’t do things like remember to take a half-eaten banana out of the car, can think of four different possible strategies and evaluate where each one will land us several moves out, and I love watching this. Basically, I’m anyone’s lackey in the game, but I don’t mind.

Tristan bought Pandemic Legacy for me and Honora last Christmas. This is a version of the game meant to be played 12 - 24 times only, with each time changing the game board, players and play permanently moving forward. We started it tonight. People, it is amazing. There are eight compartments in the box that you don’t open until you are told. There are rules on stickers to be added to the rule book in those compartments, but you don’t know what they are. You will be discarding characters and some cities will collapse and be X-ed off the board. And your own character will acquire “scars,” new traits that you add when directed. Basically, it is the coolest thing you can imagine.






We lost the first round, although we eradicated the blue disease, so we got to name and mutate it. It is now called Blurgh Disorder and it is easier to cure because it got a “positive mutation.” We got to choose an End of Game Upgrade, and we chose “Efficient to Sequence” against a permanent research station, which will speed the eradication of the remaining diseases. We will try January again tomorrow, with increased “funding” and if we lose again, we go on to February with our scars, our new situations and resources.