No biking today so Paris and environs at last

Spoilery caption #1: En route to Giverny (with the world's crappiest bike)

Another sick day so another zero day for the November Bike Challenge. It's too bad, too; the weather seemed pretty ideal for biking today: no actual rain and no apparent wind. The forecast is for rain all weekend so I'll have to hope that it rains itself out before Monday morning.

Since I have no biking to report today, it seems a fine time to write about the one bit of biking that Scott and I did while in France. It was the day we went to Giverny which nearly didn't happen at all. I'd purchased the train tickets online and while I talked about how we should scope out the station from which we'd be leaving (St. Lazare), that just didn't sound like as much fun as whatever it is we did instead the day before. "How difficult can it be?" we rationalized. "We'll leave early so we have plenty of time to find the right platform. There must be a way to claim our tickets at the station." And so forth because, lacking a printer, we also hadn't been able to print out the e-tickets and I didn't have a smartphone on which to show them to anyone.

Spoilery caption #2: Butterfly on butterfly bush by the line to get into M. Monet's house

It might have all gone smoothly, too, if that wasn't the day that Paris' usually impeccable Metro system experienced serious difficulties, the exact nature of which we never did understand. We waited longer than usual at the Place de Clichy and when a train did arrive, it was packed full. People-with-their-faces-shoved-flat-against-the-glass full. We decided we still had plenty of time so we waited for the next train. Which took longer than usual to arrive and which, when it did show, was also packed. We shoved our way onto it anyway. It paused repeatedly en route, groaning with the effort, and with incomprehensible messages being repeated by the nice French lady who is the voice of Metro emanating from the speakers. Had we sensibly scoped out St. Lazare the day before, we would have known we could just walk to it in ten or fifteen minutes. Instead, we endured the stressful twenty-minute trip on Metro.

Once at St. Lazare we made the wrong guess about where the proper platforms would be and ran the absolutely wrong way. We reached an information desk where the woman understood enough English to inform us that we were in the wrong place and to give directions to reach the correct platform. By this time it was about seven minutes before the train was scheduled to depart. (Scott, it later turned out, misunderstood the time the train was scheduled to depart and assumed all along that we had already missed it.) "Did you understand any of that?" "Maybe." "And do you think she just hated us and deliberately sent us the wrong way?" "Possibly." Still we dashed, running past the mini-mall in the center of the station ("Hey, there's a Lush!" I thought en passant), and reached a point where we could see our actual train, still sitting there at Platform 9 3/4. There was quite a crowd in the ticket office and no way we'd get through it before the train was well and truly gone. There were also a bunch of ticket machines. How hard could that be? Well, it was more challenging than I like to admit, in part I am sure because we were so stressed. But we managed to extricate our tickets and then ran--again--to the train. We were close the last ones on and we couldn't find two seats together. For a while it seemed we would not find seats at all but I managed to convey, in the universal facial language of public transit, that if that suitcase didn't have a ticket maybe it shouldn't have a seat, and Scott did the same a few rows back and so we settled in nicely for the hour or so trip into the countryside.

 Say! Just getting onto the train is an absurdly long story, and the train doesn't even get one to Giverny; it stops in Vernon which is a charming little town where I would like to spend some time. In Vernon, you switch to bikes (unless you've arranged to take the tour bus and where's the sport in that?) It turns out, however, that the "bar that rents bikes across from the train station" isn't really immediately apparent from the trains station so it took us a few minutes to find that. We also found that Rick Steves' description of the bikes as broken-down rattletraps was, perhaps, overly generous.

Les velos!

The tires were half-flat and the seats tended not to stay where they were put, sliding down on the seat stem with irritating regularity. I rejected more than one bike while Scott simply accepted the first one handed to him. Finally, with a clash of gears, no helmets, and map in hand, we were off!

A few blocks later, we were lost. Wisely we circled around to a cafe and sat down to study the photocopied map more closely, over a couple of espressos. A photo opportunity presented itself as Scott sat marveling at how much less expensive espresso was in Vernon than in Paris. Or perhaps he was just reflecting on how long 7 kilometers could be on a bike that seemed unlikely to hold together for five blocks. (In truth, he was less critical of his bike than I was of mine; never have I appreciated Bessie so much as I did on that bike that rattled and shook nonstop.)
Fortunately, while it lacked a lot of street names and the like, the map did show the location of the post office which just happened to be half a block left of Scott's left shoulder in this photo so we were able to orient ourselves and head out in the right direction. And I remembered just enough snippets of information from my web-surfing of a few nights earlier to put us onto the "path that looks like it's taking you through people's backyards" to keep us going the right way. After a while, the signs became less subtle. . .

The line

Oh, we still managed to add a bit of distance, what with not wanting to admit that the line we passed at one point was the line we would have to be in, but it all worked out, and Giverny, about which I shall write in a later installment, was absolutely charming and wonderful.

Testimony for the Cycling Jury

Today I'm home sick with the weirdest illness. Physically I feel a bit spacy and achy with near constant ringing in my ears; but the main symptom seems to be excessive sensitivity and paranoia. So, lots of sleep and no biking to report for Thursday.

The other morning another stranger slowed (in the process of passing me, yes) to compliment me on the boot lights.

Sweet Shoe Lights (Still not Paris)

It's  the "Ride in the Rain" challenge this month around Seattle at least. It's possible it may be a nationwide thing as well, but I've not bothered to look in that because, well, I'm in Seattle so it's here that matters to me. As of 6:22 p.m. of the first work day, I'm 100%. (We're counting only work days here, not weekends, okay?) On the way home it occurred to me that I might be better about continuing with this business, which is a lot more challenging than May's "Bike to Work," if I kept some sort of public record so that's what this is: my public declaration that I'm doing this and that I'll keep track of how I do here. Sure, there are maybe a dozen people who read this blog but that's how many you need for a jury, right?

 The real reason, I confess, for this going public business is actually "sweet shoe lights" because that's what a fellow cyclist said to me as he rode up next to me as I was waiting for a gap in traffic this evening. And they are pretty sweet shoe lights or, to be more precise, lightweight halo overshoes. I bought them yesterday at West Seattle Cyclery when Scott and I ducked in there to get out of the rain before getting serious about the West Seattle Farmers Market, thus demonstrating, quite forcefully, that the farmers market benefits the local businesses. (It also demonstrated a few hours later that I'd better be good about staying on a budget until my next paycheck.) S'anyways. The idea was to keep my shoes dry while riding but it's really the blinky red lights in the heels that made the purchase inevitable because I don't worry as much about getting wet as I do about getting run over (as the ever-increasing number of lights on my bike and person demonstrates).

The blinky boots (not blinking because this is a still photo. Unfortunately)

I took my usual route on the way home this evening but I won't be doing that again, not until spring. The park I like to wend my way through turns out to be pitch dark--which doesn't stop people from having their dogs there, romping about. Between worrying about going off the path and crashing downhill and worrying about colliding with a bounding dog, I found it wasn't so relaxing. It's the duller but presumably safer (as long as my blinky heels are working!) streets for me this month.

There's more to this evening's challenges: the red blinky light on the back of Bessie's basket was fussy about working before I even left the parking lot so that required a few minutes with my trusty Swiss Army knife before I could set off into the dark of the night. Then Bessie slipped her chain as I was shifting down to the absurdly low gear I require to get over the West Seattle Bridge and fell over as I was fixing that, wrapping herself about the pole I'd leaned her against. As I was wrestling her back upright, after putting her chain back on, a cyclist slowed to ask if I had everything in hand so it turned out to be a sort of nice thing since I do like the way other cyclists so often show concern. (That I am so often in a condition to elicit concern is less great.)

That's a grand total of just over four miles -- and just about 400 feet of elevation gain. Phew! I need a cocktail!

"For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle," or Why I Heart Ernest Hemingway

Don't think that I'm unaware that I tend to write about books when I've not liked them, while remaining fairly silent about those that I have enjoyed. I've wondered why this should be and, having just finished A Moveable Feast, which is the sort of book that leads one to think that another drink is perfectly reasonable, I have a few theories.

 It's possible, I might suggest, that after you finish reading an abysmal novel you don't worry about how lousy your own writing might be. Oh, you might be particularly careful about not having grammatical errors as you write to complain about a writer who can't manage noun-verb agreement, but you don't feel like every sentence you write is not good. But I think that's only part of it. Maybe. More, maybe, it's just hard to write much in praise of a good book without it being fatuous, false, and, really, in the case of something like a book by Hemingway, utterly unnecessary.

 But I've come late to Hemingway, it being only a few years ago that I read one novel or another, possibly The Sun Also Rises, and realized that I'd been wrong about him all my life; he really does write a fine novel and his language, once you get used to it, is as good as anything anyone has ever written. It's a weird cross between naivete and cynicism; it's not only his characters, but the writing itself that shares those characteristics. It's plainly beyond my ability to identify properly, let alone explain. But it's pretty darned breathtaking and obviously a lot harder than it looks. It's like what one sculptor or another said about chipping away all the parts of a block of marble that aren't the statue. 

 I'm not claiming that this bit I'm going to quote exemplifies what I'm talking about but I love it because it's just such a fine view of a different world (and, you know, cats):

When there were the three of us instead of just the two, it was the cold and the weather that finally drove us out of Paris in the winter time. Alone there was no problem when you got used to it. I could always go to a cafe to write and could work all morning over a cafe creme while the waiters cleaned and swept out the cafe and it gradually grew warm. My wife could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters keep warm playing and come home to nurse Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a cafe in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that happened and was never bored. There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big loving cat named F. Puss. There were people who said that it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby's breath and kill him. Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat's weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out and Marie, the femme de menage, had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter. 

 (from page 197 of  A Moveable Feast, Scribner edition)

Oh, for those happy days when parents not only could leave their infant children at home in a walk-up apartment to be watched by the family cat but also knew that even the most well-behaved child didn't belong at a cafe where, after all, writers needed to have quiet to spend the morning nursing a single cup of coffee while the waiters swept and tidied. I found myself wondering as I read this book, a month or so after returning from Paris myself, if Mr Hemingway's Paris ever truly existed; if there was a time when you really could spend hours writing in a cafe without feeling self-conscious. And then I wondered if maybe it was just that Hemingway and his crowd weren't the sort to ever feel self-conscious and maybe if I were different, I would be able to settle into a cafe table for a few hours. Maybe the waiters would come to like me so much they'd fill my glass full of straight whiskey accompanied by the saucer that indicated that the price of my drink was ten francs--or whatever today's equivalent might be. Somehow it seems unlikely.

 I also realized, as I typed out that extract above, that Mr Hemingway eschewed a lot of commas. 

There's so much in this book: Paris, of course (in Hemingway's Paris, milk goats trot along the streets in the early morning, with the goats being milked on the spot for those who wish to purchase a quart. God, how I want to visit that Paris!), learning to write, portraits of artists and writers, even avalanche and skiing tips. There's also a ton of drinking.

In Europe then we thought of wine as something as healthy and normal as food and also as a great giver of happiness and well being and delight. Drinking wine was not a snobbism or a sign of sophistication nor a cult; it was as natural as eating and to me as necessary, and I would not have thought of eating a meal without drinking either wine or cider or beer.  .  .  . I could not imagine one whiskey harming anyone who was driving in an open car in the rain. The alcohol should have been oxidized in a very short time.

 (from pages 166 - 167 of A Moveable Feast)

 This bit is from the first chapter about F. Scott Fitzgerald who, lightweight that he is, gets badly drunk on as little as three or four whiskeys and his share of four bottles of "a light white"--the latter consumed while driving that car in the rain. The descriptions of Fitzgerald are things of beauty. The end of the book is surprisingly heartbreaking. The writing isn't gorgeous, because it's not lush. It's just perfect. That's all it is.

Waiting For The Man: A Bee Update

What can *now* be found in the refrigerator: leafcutter cocoons!

Alternate post titles include "Blustery Halloween Day" and "Not About Paris, Again; What's Up With That?" It is, in fact, a blustery Halloween and I'm sort of spending it waiting for the refrigerator repair guy to come look at the refrigerator and determine what needs to be replaced so that it does not repeat its unpleasant trick of earlier this week, namely ceasing to refrigerate. After shifting the fortunately fairly meagre contents into coolers to keep the stuff from going bad and then proceeding with  the "unplug and open all the doors" defrost that was recommended, we took all the shelves and drawers out to wash them. A large part of me now believes that the spirit of Aurora tampered with the refrigerator just so we'd give it a proper cleaning; it's kind of creepy just how nasty some of those hidden parts of one's refrigerator can become. And not so hidden too. People! Look at the jars of weird old stuff that have been sitting on the refrigerator door since your last party!

But that sort of public service announcement isn't exactly a bee update. It being the last day of October, I was finally moved to bring in the leafcutter bee trays (which, yes, should have been shifted to a cool, dry garage a month ago) and see what they might contain. I've put it off, frankly, because I was pretty damned sure our leafcutter experiment had failed miserably. A good half of the cocoons never hatched and after the first rush of bees that were already awake when we opened the box, I'm not sure that I ever saw another leafcutter bee in the yard. I also had my doubts that any of the cocoons that had hatched contained females. So I figured we'd find nothing but a bit of mold in the trays and I don't need that sort of disappointment.

The modest harvest

 The secret of happiness, I discovered quite some time ago, has nothing to do with having plants in your house or a hobby, no matter what  some fluffy online articles might advise, but rather is having low expectations. Oh, that might be the outlook of certifiably depressed personality but I tell you, it works. Not expecting to find anything in the bee trays, I was utterly ecstatic to discover instead a few cocoons. Had I expected them to be full? Well, this post would be bitter, rather than pretty darned chirpy. And, you know, they're pretty miraculous little things, these tiny packets made of nibbled bits of leaf. Nature, when you stop to look, is really pretty amazing. Just take a moment to click on that first photo above and marvel not at how I still haven't gotten a macro lens so I still never have a decent photo of small things but rather at how intricately those tiny little bites of leaves are knit together, using tiny bee saliva.

Water your bee humidifier monthly

 But back to the scientific reportage. We carefully removed the cocoons from the tray (I used a bit of dried poppy stalk to--gently--pry them loose) and then we put them into the refrigerator in their little plastic humidifier to which I'd added a few spoons of water. It was a scene that I'm now realizing was reminiscent of the bit in It's A Wonderful Life where George puts Mama Dollar and Papa Dollar into the office tray and marches them off to the vault with the instructions to have a family "real quick." Of course the cocoons won't mate but I do hope their contents survive the next several months and that five or six healthy and ambitious leafcutters emerge next summer. The timing worries me since the paperwork says both that they'll need to hatch and start eating in six or seven months or they'll starve and that they should go out not later than the end of July which is more like nine months. I'm hoping for a warm May, is what I'm hoping for. I'm also not sure how to separate what must be two or three cocoons so I'm further hoping that since they're not separated in their natural setting, they'll be fine here. It's always possible that since so few cocoons were placed that I've got a bunch of males too but, well, my plan is to care for them as best I can and hope for the best.  (For some of us, apparently, the greatest of these is hope.)

 In other, only very tangentially related news, the pine siskins are back! The dark-eyed juncos still outnumber them in the backyard but it's nice to see the siskins. Below, however, is neither siskin nor junco and it's not even from the yard; no, it's a ruby-crowned kinglet we saw last weekend at Camp Long. We learned then that not only do kinglets sometimes sound a lot like a Bewick's wren, they also have a "song" that sounds like typing on an old manual typewriter which, on first hearing, might make you think that an Anna's hummingbird is in the area. The Anna's, though, is more squeaky bike chain, of course.

Whereupon I explicate

It's a chilly Sunday afternoon and I've been reading Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding, not with what you'd call enjoyment but rather with a desperate desire to be finished with it. Last weekend, I think it was, Scott and I stopped at a neighborhood Little Free Library and I saw this book that I'd vaguely considered reading when it first came out. Back about that time, however, we were in Secret Garden Books and the bookseller there, in an attempt to close the sale, compared it to a John Irving book. I'd forgotten that little exchange until yesterday so last week, when I saw the book in the library box, I remembered only that I'd been interested in it. Figuring the price was right, I brought the free library copy home.

 The title of Mr Harbach's novel, that'd be the one I'm reading, comes from a fictional book (The Art of Fielding) by a fictional shortstop (Rodriguez Aparicio) that is the bible to Mr Harbach's fictional shortstop (Henry Skrimshander); it's full of pithy stuff like "The shortstop is a source of  stillness at the center of the defense. He projects this stillness and his teammates respond." (Somehow this now reminds me of the scene in The Wind and the Lion in which Candace Bergen responds to the Sean Connery character saying, as they play chess, "It is the will of Allah. I am but an instruments of that will. It is the wind that passes, but the sea remains" with, "A stitch in time saves nine. Your move.") The realization I have reached is that I would less annoyed if I were reading the shortstop's book, inferior though it obviously would be to Pure Baseball. This New York Times "book of the year" novel--it really pretty much sucks.

 And I may be driven to put it that way because the thing that is really truly irritating me about this book is the idiocy of the language (see also, the title for this post which is my homage to some of the word choices). A woman showing a visitor her house, "explicates the virtues of California closets." Elsewhere the college president holds up "a placative hand." And then there's this:

He'd told Pella he needed to work until four, whereupon they'd drive to Door County to buy her some new clothes. He drove fast and parked the Audi. The glass doors of St. Anne's parted to grant him entrance.

What the hell, I ask, is this author doing? "whereupon"? "parted to grant him entrance"? And between those two excessively grandiose (and just wrong) sentences you stick "He drove fast"? How does anyone over the age of twelve write such sentences and not recognize their hideousness? How does a book containing such juvenile language get not only published but lauded as a great book?

 The story itself is no great shakes and also not particularly innovative: there are some parts done so much better by Evelyn Waugh in Brideshead Revisited and other parts done back in the early 1990s by Donna Tartt in The Secret History. Possibly there are some would-be echoes of Franny and Zooey as well. I guess I've left out the baseball part. (Did Salinger ever write about baseball? You'd think he would have done.) Possibly that's because I just can't bear to think of David James Duncan's The Brothers K existing in the same universe as The Art of Fielding. Waugh, Salinger, and Duncan know their way around a sentence and a paragraph and if they use a word, they use it knowing it's the right word for the job. You don't read those guys and wonder what sort of defective word-a-day calendar they got in last year's white elephant gift exchange.

 Earlier today Scott told me, as I was going on in much this same vein (but also getting the leaves raked), that The Art of Fielding had been rejected by a lot of publishers before someone, perhaps John Irving (who gives it a blurb--"easy to read" is apparently a powerful endorsement), recommended it to a publisher. This anecdote, true or not, keeps me from despairing entirely about the state of American publishing.

 Being me, I will read the remaining 140 pages of The Art of Fielding but then, oh then, I pray I'll read something less wretched.

Non-Paris Interlude: Of Bikes and Birds

This Parisian bike has very little to do with this post, other than being a bike. Mais, c'est jolie, non?

Some days, I confess, I'm less fond of my carless lifestyle than I like to let on. I sigh as I get onto my bike for the ride home, which is largely uphill, and I find myself thinking about putting Bessie on the bus, and then I fantasize, ever so briefly, about having a car. I've signed up for the November "Ride in the Rain" challenge and, by gum, I intend to bike, although I don't have proper cycling gear and I'm not sure how well-lit my route is likely to be. But it's bike or walk and biking is faster but if I had the option, I think I'd drive, especially since rather than becoming a stronger cyclist, I feel that I'm getting slower and less willing more reluctant to ride up that final hill to get home. All of this preamable is to explain that some evenings, especially as the dark and the wet start to move in, I get on my bike with a certain lack of enthusiasm.

 A few days ago I was particularly cranky leaving work and I said to Bessie, as I turned her around and pushed her out of the warehouse, "Do your magic." And she did. It was an excellent ride on a crisp autumn evening, and I felt a million times better by the time I reached home. But even knowing that a few miles on the bike can have this happy effect on me, I still dragged myself out of the office this evening, rather discouraged because I was too late for one bus and too early for the next. But I cycled to Longfellow Creek where I paused to see what birds might be on offer. It was maddening; I could hear any number of birds but saw very few. At last, after looking through my binoculars to identify a robin and a black-capped chickadee, I tracked down an irate (is there any other kind?) Bewick's wren and then decided that I'd be on my way. But the birdsong intensified and I decided I simply must see one more bird so I pushed my bike along towards the second bridge, a hundred yards or so down the creek. I could hear one very odd, "large"-sounding bird that I was certain I'd be able to see from that second bridge. As I got near, however, I encountered a young man who told me, with a certain gleam in his eye I recognized only too well, that he'd seen an owl. He was so excited, telling me about how it turned its head and how it looked and, well, it was utterly charming. He said he'd watched it for a while and then it flew off, maybe about one hundred feet, but he'd lost it. He hoped I'd see it on my bike ride and we parted. Meanwhile, the bird that had been making the intriguing noise had fallen silent or flown away.

Not today's barred owl, but probably a relative.

 I had a good look around anyway and, by gum, eventually the owl showed! It was, as I had suspected it would be, a barred owl so not one for the life list but, OWL! I don't think I'll ever yawn about seeing an owl. And it flew hither and yon and I lost it again and I was thinking about maybe finally heading up the hills to home when a woman came by walking her dog. Seeing my binoculars, she told me that that morning she had seen, right there on that log in the creek and then right there on that low branch of a tree, an OWL! I shared her excitement and then told that I had just seen the owl myself! We bonded with some owl enthusiasm and then she continued along to her house. A few moments later she came back out to tell me that the owl was now in that tree over there! I parked Bessie again and sauntered up to look. Suddenly there was a great deal of commotion: I swear I saw a black cat streak through the underbrush, a thrush-size bird flap away, a small dog bark madly in its yard, a squirrel hasten along a branch, and an owl and a hawk suddenly start to wing about, chasing each other through the trees. It was all pretty damned amazing. Eventually the hawk landed on a branch where I could have a look at it. It looked somewhat like a harrier to my excited eyes but it was more likely a Coopers or sharpshinned hawk as I don't think we get harriers at Longfellow Creek.

 A little time passed and I finally pointed Bessie towards the hills and wended my way home. I had to push her up part of one block which is, yes, downright dispiriting but I blame some trouble with my gears rather than entirely attributing it to my old age. But mostly I was thinking people in cars don't go by Longfellow Creek and don't stop upon noticing birdsong and spend time with their binoculars tracking down little--and not so little--birds and, very likely, don't see owls on their evening commute, let alone an owl and a hawk hashing out their territorial disputes. So it's not so bad, this bike commuting thing.