Memories -- October 1, 2023

Locator: 45614ARCH. 

This brings back great memories.

During my postings to Menwith Hill Station, Yorkshire, England, UK, back in the first decade of the 21st century, I literally "ran" down the hill every Sunday morning to the little village store and bought three Sunday newspapers: The [London] Guardian, The [London] Telegraph, and, The [London] Times.

From The Guardian:

I'm in good company.

At that village store, I would also buy fresh bread, bacon, eggs. I would run back up the hill, prepare an incredibly wonderful breakfast and spend the morning reading the newspapers before spending the rest of the day hiking the fields of Yorkshire. 

Wow, those were the days. 

Hermione Lee, the great biographer lives in Oxford and in Yorkshire.

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The End Of Summer In Texas

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The Gilded Age

From Hermione Lee's biography of Edith Wwharton, page 47;

Wharton's versions of the dramatic economic developments of the "Gilded Age" was a personal and local one.

She came at it through lives of individuals, especially women, in the social group she knew.

She was not an American realist like Upton Sinclair or Frank Norris. She did not "do," head-on and large-scale, the building of the great monopolies in oil, steel and meat-packing, the mighty expansion of the railroads, the settlement of the West, the great surge in technological inventions, (the telephone, the car, the electric light), the expansion  of the communications industry, the massive increases in post-war industrial productivity between 1870 and 1910, the more than doubling of the population, the gathering waves of immigration, the phenomenal rise in incomes at the top (and the savage decline at the bottom), the titanic power of the bankers and financiers, the huge building programmes in the cities.

Wow, if this doesn't read like it could have been written about the US, 2010 - 2020. Just saying.

Substitutions:

She was not an American realist like Upton Sinclair or Frank Norris. She did not "do," head-on and large-scale, the building of the great monopolies in e-commerce, sports and blades, the mighty expansion of the government, the great migration to the south, the great surge in technological inventions, (AI, the EV, the smart phone), the expansion  of the communications industry, the massive increases in post-Reagan industrial productivity between 2010 and 2020, the more than doubling of the non-white population, the gathering waves of immigration, the phenomenal rise in incomes at the top (and the savage decline at the bottom), the titanic power of the Fed, the huge building programmes in the cities.

Until very recently I never "understood" the antagonism or the anger the young journalists, the disenfranchised, the novelists, the artists had for the bourgeoisie, although I think that Marxists have a slightly different view / interpretation / definition of bourgeoisie than most non-Marxists.

But recently, due to road construction, I have had to take a different route to Bob Jones Park, Southlake, TX, where Sophia has her soccer practice, I now understand the anger those aforementioned folks have with regard to the bourgeoisie. I now understand it. Seventy-plus years of age and I finally get it. It helped to have re-read Edith Wharton. 

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Asteroid City

See this link -- I'm in my Asteroid City phase.

A reader wrote this in response to a YouTube analysis of the movie.

I don't know if it was apocryphal -- I tend to believe not -- but it is said that the other folks on the set did not know that Jason Schwartzman was going to intentionally burn his hand. 

Filming took place between August and October, 2021, and among so many other interpretations, it was a commentary on the "whole Covid-19 thing." If so, the movie needs to be re-seen in that light.

I saw it three times in theater, and have watched it several times on Amazon Prime Video.

Of the many, many YouTube interpretations, I recommend this as among the top five, perhaps the best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD4txG0fDnM. 

It's very, very long....