Making the weekend lived

I know I have no time to write this - 21:15 on a Sunday, an as yet unprepared lecture to give at nine o'clock tomorrow morning, and a paper that had to be written a week and two days ago... but not to let the weekend go by as if never lived:

Yesterday I was on a bus with a woman who was talking to herself in sign language.

It reminded me of being on a ship in Japan in a big tatami room with a large number of people, among which was a group of deaf people with their hearing children. At night the children ran riot while their parents slept soundly, until someone else took the initiative and told them to be quiet. But I particularly remember a small girl falling over during the day and then making a completely silent crying face to her parents.

In the last three days I have done much essential shopping - alarm clocks, toilet brushes, shoes, that kind of thing. And I have ascertained finally that the blank stares I meet with any time I ask to be directed to the cotton wool is not because of my pronunciation, but because the term doesn't exist here. If you think about it, it must sound rather strange if you've never heard it before.

I also discovered the difficulty of asking to be directed to the other cheese counter in King Soopers. They have, for some reason, the bog-standard American cheese at one end of the supermarket, and the things you might consider eating at the other end. If you haven't thought it out in advance, then when the man asks you, "What kind of cheese are you looking for?" it is difficult to find a reply that people around won't find offensive: "Something edible." "Something that doesn't taste like plastic and glow bright orange." Cheddar, Muenster, Swiss, Provolone... perhaps someone American can tell me the difference, since to me the only discernible one is the colour. Oh, and then there is "American" which in my thankfully limited experience is reminiscent of the semi-digested milk someone's baby once threw up on me, only orange again.

When you think about it, it's amazing that I should have reached this age and only been thrown up on by a baby once.

I also found acceptable tissues at last. As recommended, the source is Target. They have those small almost cubic boxes in single plain colours: burgundy, navy, and Regency green (my term - I have no idea what that shade is really called). Now I am prepared to catch horrible colds in winter and not be made to feel worse by the sight of nasty floral tissue boxes.

Antiseptic Blue

So this is what happens when you finally find a tissue box that is just marginally acceptable. The tissues inside turn out to be a blue colour which is reminiscent of hospital walls. Well, I have been led to understand that there are more attractive options at Target, and I am off now to investigate.

Defamiliarization

Earlier on, I was in a coffee shop (having got my moving expenses today, and such a thing being once more possible) reading the beginning of Shklovsky's Theory of Prose (Benjamin Sher's translation, from Dalkey Archive Press). Talking of "automatization," the process by which things become so familiar as to be unconscious (defamiliarization, or "enstrangement" as the translator would have it, thus being the way in which art brings the object back to conscious experience), he quotes Tolstoy's diary:

"As I was walking around dusting things off in my room, I came to the sofa. For the life of me, I couldn't recall whether I had already dusted it off or not. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious, I felt that it was already impossible to remember it. If I had in fact dusted the sofa and forgotten that I had done so, i.e., if I had acted unconsciously, then this is tantamount to not having done it at all. If someone had seen me doing this consciously, then it might have been possible to restore this in my mind. If, on the other hand, no one had been observing me or observing me only unconsciously, if the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been."

Presumably the experience is familiar to everyone. As well as the things I forget immediately, there are whole days which sink into oblivion. Don't we write blogs, diaries, letters, or tell our days to someone else in order to make time "lived"? These last few days might as well never have been for me - I've had nothing to say.

I then read on to Shklovsky's comment following the quotation, as follows:

"And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of wax."

I like the suggestion of automatization as an infestation of destructive moths here, but I was particularly drawn to the last item. "Our fear of wax" was so unexpected, and yet in the instant of reading made so much sense. I could see at once the chilling verisimilitude of waxworks, and the waxen appearance of the dead.

Then I looked back at the passage and found that I had transposed an 'x' from a word in the following line, and that it really said "our fear of war."

Shklovsky had just been talking of fragmentary hearings, misunderstandings, and slips of the tongue, too. Misreadings, I'd say, can have an unintentional defamiliarizing effect all of their own, and the possibilities add cathedrals of space to what we read.

Packaging

I have just succeeded in buying a box of tissues. This may seem a trivial achievement to the rest of you, but it often takes me weeks. I go into store after store and am so put off by the floral patterns and nasty shades of pastel that I leave empty-handed.

Why is tissue packaging so uniformly bad? A box of tissues has to become part of my furnishings for several weeks. Shouldn't I be able to get one in a colour that I like? If I was in Japan and said this, someone would rush to buy or make me a tissue box cover. It would almost certainly come with frills and lace, however, and would lose the one advantage that the bare box has - that I can throw it away guilt-free once it is empty.

I would like solid blocks of primary colours, I think, or boxes pretending to be other things: swiss cheese, an apartment building, a green felt hill with fuzzy sheep you could move around.

St. Ephraim

So, the only parts of my UK visit I haven't gone into here are the short trips within Scotland to Glasgow and Edinburgh. I've been meaning to say that in Glasgow I went to the Burrell Collection twice, and once to Kelvingrove; and in Edinburgh I went thrice, though briefly, to the National Museum of Scotland, and twice to the National Gallery. The reason I mention these is just to point out that entry to all of these museums and galleries is free. It seems such a wonderful and civilized thing.

My trips to the National Gallery were to look at my favourite picture, and to drag other people along and point at it. If you go in to the Gallery by the old entrance just opposite the back of the Royal Scottish Academy, and not the beautiful new entrance that has joined the two together, walk straight in (dodging carefully around the collection box, of course, because you wouldn't want to be asked to leave before you have even got your foot properly in the door) and up the first oval flight of stairs you meet, then from the top of the stairs move towards the right hand side of the facing wall, you will find now rather too high up on the wall a small painting which is a fragment cut from a much larger work. It is entitled "The Burial of St. Ephraim." Actually, I could have sworn that when it was in its better position on the wall on the left at the top of the stairs it was called "The Death of St. Ephraim," which makes more sense to me since there's no sign of anyone digging a hole, and the ground looks too frozen for it to be possible anyway. Yes, St. Ephraim will have to lie there through the long and desolate winter, with that hooded woman draped like a drift of snow at his feet. Except that St. Ephraim is St. Ephraim the Syrian, and the setting is desert, not snow.

The woman too may not be a woman. I've always assumed that she is, but she is dressed in the same flowing robes as the small gathering of men who stand behind the bier, many of them talking or disputing in an unexpectedly animated fashion. In front of them St. Ephraim lies with his head towards the right, and with his feet in the direction of a hut of sorts. In the background is a mountain range with three figures following a path over it, one of whom appears to be the Saint himself - arriving there in earlier days? - crossing now to the afterlife? If you look toward the bottom foreground the land suddenly ends as if the funeral crowd is standing on a fragment of the earth's crust which has broken off and floated away, something which is oddly appropriate for a piece of painting cut from a larger work.

When you get back to your house after a long trip you can find that everything looks subtly different, somehow strangely dimensioned, or as if someone has knocked the house down while you were away and built an exact reproduction. Whenever I come back to this painting it's like that too. Even now, I can't be sure if much of the above is true, or whether it is a description of a picture which exists only in my imagination. I don't know, for instance, which way those three figures (three figures?) crossing the mountains are walking. If to the left, the direction in which the dead man's feet are pointing, which will take them up and behind the hut, then I'd say they have to be leaving. If to the right, in the direction indicated by the dead man's head, they could curve down and arrive at the space which holds the crowd. Sadly (or perhaps not so sadly, since it gives me ample opportunity to wander in a picture of my own making) this isn't one of the works that the National Gallery has seen fit to put into their online collection, though they do have another St. Ephraim picture there.

They do, however, have there a picture which I hadn't seen (hadn't noticed?) before this visit, "Scenes from the Lives of the Hermits and from the Passion of Christ," which if I remember rightly from reading the notice in the gallery, is also a representation of the burial of St. Ephraim - see the right foreground. Around the rest of the picture are strange little scenes of people behaving in all kinds of suspect ways you wouldn't expect of hermits - see the haloed man in a robe chasing the naked haloed man near the top left, for instance - as well as a selection of odd animals and demons. It's a shame that they haven't made it possible to zoom much closer for this painting - there could be hours of fun in looking at the bizarre goings-on.

Gold dust

Today I found gold dust in my apartment.

Or to be more accurate, gold fluff.

In the corner of each room there is an old-fashioned radiator. Since I moved in I've been trying not to look too hard at these corners. The floorboards underneath the radiators are grey and bare, either from age or from leak-damage. The hard-to-reach inner ridges of the radiators themselves, as well as the areas around the pipes which lead out of them, are filled with matted dust and fluff. I did a lot of cleaning when I moved in, but these spaces were beyond what I could stomach at the time. Today, as part of my ongoing project to make my house pleasant to live in, I tried to tackle them. I discovered that when the radiators were spray-painted gold, it was done on top of the existing fluff. Bleugh! How many years of other people's dead skin and hair am I living with?

All I have done today is clean and clean. When I moved in I asked for the filthy windows to be washed on the outside, but two and a half months later not even the simple repairs I requested have been dealt with, so I know that the window cleaning will certainly never happen. I thought today, if New Caledonian crows can find a way to get at the snacks scientists hide for them, then surely I can find a way to clean the outsides of my windows. And I did manage some of them, by a mixture of lying on my back with the windows closed onto my shoulders and reaching up as far as I could (which is quite far, if you have arms as long and skinny as mine), and pushing wads of wet cloth down between the gaps between the windows when open and retreiving them at the bottom. Some panes I had to leave in the interests of not knocking the screens onto unsuspecting passers-by, and others in the interests of not falling out myself.

My apartment looks unusually shining and well-ordered, though, if I don't look hard in the direction of the radiators.

Doncaster from Denver

I've just been looking on the website of the Denver Post, because I remembered hearing even more sirens than usual yesterday when I was sitting at home. It appears that someone working in a shop on 16th Street Mall got shot. While I was away someone got themselves shot in the Capitol building too. It's not comforting to be in a place where the law entrusts any old maniac with your life. That could be said for drivers' licensing too, of course, as you would know if you were one of we foreign people who have to go and sit around in the DMV once a year to renew our licenses.

But what really struck me on the Denver Post site tonight was the "Post Poll" at the top of their "Denver and the West" page. It reads:

Will you watch tonight's pre-season game between the Broncos and the 49ers?

o Yes
o I might
o No
o Don't know

Vote now!

The Denver Post - taking civic engagement and democracy to new heights.

Well, since I am already in a complaining mode, it is time to talk of Doncaster.

Doncaster

- is in Yorkshire, but is sadly far removed from the hilly stone-walled sheep-dotted landscape many of us might associate with the name, being in the South.
- is a town of many similar looking houses all built of strangely smooth-faced deep red bricks.
- was once prosperous and thriving, or so I've been told.
- has numbers of my relatives living in and around it.

From childhood I've been going to Doncaster from Scotland on a fairly regular basis and have always felt oppressed by all that red brick. As I have got older, though, I've begun to wonder - do people who grow up in Doncaster and visit Scotland have a similar reaction to all those grey buildings that I think are so stately? Do they find them cold, where I find them elegantly cool?

Anyway, the trip wasn't to look at red brick, but to visit my 92 year old grandmother, and so I should be less ungracious. It was, again, a family trip, and on our full day there we all went out to the village of Epworth, which was red brick and pretty. We visited The Old Rectory, the childhood home of John and Charles Wesley, founders of Methodism. There wasn't a great deal to see inside the house - though looking round houses is always fun if you're not engaged in trying to rent one - but the physic garden outside was interesting. I like kitchen gardens and physic gardens. I can imagine putting in the effort if the plants are going to enhance my dinner. Otherwise, I feel somewhat the same about flowers as I do about fireworks. In the one garden I've ever had, in Japan, I successfully grew hordes of caterpillars which ate my neighbours' trees. My ambition for my future house in the U.S. is to have a yard full of prairie dogs.

In the physic garden I saw licorice in its natural form for the first time. It looks like this:

Back in town in the evening we went to Eating Whole, a tiny vegetarian restaurant that serves a great organic cider (the British alcoholic sort, not the American soda) and a deep-fried blue cheese appetizer, both of which have the power to make me suddenly warm to Doncaster.