Late July 2021
Now that I
am regularly going into the office twice a week in addition to on an as needed
basis, I am witnessing the growth of the corn by my bus stop. Earlier this week
there was plenty of mini-maize as tassels were a-sproutin' everywhere.
The farm and
adjacent disused cement factory are still for sale (~$9,000,000, I am told) and a non-profit continues to work towards buying it. They intend to keep at least part of the property going as a
working farm. I am ambivalent about such a plan.
Maintaining a working farm would be novel, no doubt, and may have environmental benefits such as absorbing
heat and allowing run-off to percolate into the soil. But my neighborhood suffers from a paucity of commercial
space. It would be really nice to have a tavern or a coffee shop just a couple
blocks from home. Or a decent restaurant or a pet food store or a hardware store and so on. Most of
these things aren't that far away but they are well beyond 2 blocks. One of the great virtues of the Eastmorland neighborhood is that it's close to other neighborhoods that have establishments that I like to frequent. It just doesn't have such places in it. Eastmorland is essentially a bedroom community.
Well, soon
we'll have fresh sweet corn and thusly Mexican street corn will be in abundance.
And the first apples will be ready for harvest shortly. Our favorite orchard
is advertising an opening date of 15 August. Summer is flying by.
********
I concluded my last entry chronicling a bike ride in media res so here's the finale.
After
looking at all of the fancy schmancy homes in the University Heights
neighborhood where the University big wigs from the days of yore lived or had
streets named after them, I started my trek home. As is normally the case, I
did not go straight home but rather took many detours. One of those was to
check out a historic marker that I'd driven and ridden by many a time. In fact,
I used to live a block away from it while in college and knew someone who lived next door
to the house with the marker but I had no recollection of what it commemorated.
Well, it turned
out to be the home of Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette, a
progressive firebrand during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries who was governor of Wisconsin as well as a senator. He also founded
The Progressive magazine. La Follette and wife moved into this house in 1881, I believe
the marker said.
On the way
there I passed by a notable Little Free Library. Back in entry #2, methinks, I
noted the bit of vernacular Madison architecture that is the Trachte building.
The classic model was a steel-walled structure with a barrel-shaped roof. Well, I rode by what must
surely be the only Trachte Little Free Library in existence.
Soon enough
I was riding for home once again. While going down a side street, I came across
a first for me: a Lawrence Welk bumper sticker. And a polka one too.
********
An entry or
2 ago I noted that I had seen a poster for a theatrical presentation of Rashomon
down at the University. Well, the Frau and I went to see a performance of it
and we enjoyed it quite a bit.
The set consisted
of the Rashomon gate and a bamboo grove. Three characters were always at the gate
while flashbacks of the action played out in the grove, which rotated. And, of
course, the actors came to the front of the stage and faced the audience during
scenes when they gave their accounts to the unseen constabulary of what happened amongst the bamboo trees.
There were a
couple times that I felt the dialogue was too on the nose about the play's
themes. Having the wigmaker blurt out the main theme should have been left in
the rehearsal room, in my opinion, but what do I know? I'm no dramaturgist. Otherwise, it was very good.
I always
tear up at the end of the movie when the woodcutter decides to take the abandoned baby home to raise as his own. This act restores the priest's hope for humanity which he'd lost after hearing the horrible story of what happened in the grove. And I did so during the play. That scene just kills me.
It was ironic
that the theater department chose this play because, just days before I noticed the
poster for the show, I had purchased the movie on Blu-ray - the Criterion
Collection version.
When it
rains, it pours. A few days after seeing the play, the BBC Arts and Ideas
podcast reposted their episode on Rashomon which looked that the film as
well as its source material, the short stories "In a Grove" and "Rashomon" by Ryƫnosuke
Akutagawa. The podcast can be found here.
********
The bonus
photo is plural this time. Kind of. A friend of the Frau's found a reproduction
of Thomas Gainsborough's c1770 painting The Blue Boy…
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