The Corona Diaries Vol. 27: Even I Have Never Heard a Story As Horrible As This

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.

I suspect this is feed corn or that it is turned into ethanol as I have never seen the crops in this field harvested before, say, mid-November. A couple years ago they didn't clear the field until December. Otherwise, I'd indulge my atavistic hunter gatherer tendencies and grab a couple ears here and there to score points with the Frau by bringing home exceedingly fresh corn for dinner.

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.

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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 19^th and early 20^th 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.

At about this point in the morning I recalled that my cats were on the brink of starvation and so I headed of towards my local purveyor of skipjack tuna & shrimp chow, MadCat.

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.

It was a reasonable facsimile of the building that it stood in front of.

When I arrived at the pet store I found, as is normally the case on Saturdays, that one of the Frau's friends was on duty there. She always asks about our cats and is a reliable cat sitter for short vacations. I was soon flush with cat food wet and dry and was assured of being welcomed home like a conquering hero, by 2 cats, anyway. As I was unlocking my bicycle, I noticed that someone has modified the sign on the other side of the parking lot.

Poor hounds.

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.

I took another detour through an overgrown section of the Dixon Greenway. There's a trail on the south side of the park near some railroad tracks that leads to the West Branch of Starkweather Creek. It has always been a bit tricky with a small stump in the middle of it but it had recently become quite precarious with another arboreal peril thrown in. A couple weeks previously I discovered that a certain patch of tree roots had become even more exposed and that, unless you stick to the very inside of the path, your front bicycle wheel will plant itself up against one of them and you will get a look of surprise on your face which quickly becomes terror as your butt leaves your seat and it flies over your bike's handlebars with the rest of your body. Ergo I was walking my bike that day. As I was strolling along, I found a bee busy collecting nectar on a flower that I cannot identify.

I eventually made it home without incident.

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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.

According to the program, the play was written by Fay and Michael Kanin and was based on Akira Kurosawa's film. It opened on Broadway in 1959.

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.

Truth be known, Barnes & Noble has been selling Criterion discs for 50% off all month and I have been taking advantage of their generosity.

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 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa. The podcast can be found here.

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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…

…and transformed it into a portrait of Prince.