The Corona Diaries Vol. 65: Harvest Time

(late August 2022)

(Watch the prelude, if you dare...)

The arrival of August means that the harvest season has begun in these parts. (And that autumn is nigh.) A couple weeks ago I accompanied my Frau and her friend out to Lapacek’s Orchard which I’ve mentioned in a diary entry or 2 previously. And by “accompanied” I mean they made me drive. It was overcast, as much of the month has been, but temperate.

Lapacek’s has lots of farm cats so, before you get anywhere near an apple, you are approached by some feline friends wanting pets.

 

 

In addition to apples, they grow berries as well as various vegetables. It looked like they would have a bumper pepper crop this year.

 

There is also a petting zoo featuring goats aplenty.

This one got the "Three Billy Goats Gruff" thing backwards. No trolls here!

When they weren’t climbing stumps or traversing the bridge, they were jockeying for position to get petted.

And you know Black Philip was there. “Would you like to live deliciously?”

It was opening day for the season so there were only a few varieties of apples on offer.

Still, the Frau ended up buying a peck plus a jug of cider and a stash of cider doughnuts. We started the apple season out right and now have to figure out what to do with all of these pomaceous treats.

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My latest read was Arc d’X by Steve Erickson. I cannot recall exactly where I heard of it but it was no doubt an online article about avant-garde literature.

A few (or was it several?) years back, I re-read one of my favorite novels, The Name of the Rose, and did some internet searching for books like it. My sleuthing led me to a few sites about difficult works of literature, tales that were not merely a series of linear events where Action A led to Action B and so on. These books sometimes progressed non-linearly, utilized weird or uncommon writing styles, are thematically dense, etc.

 

The Name of the Rose and John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, difficult reads each, are favorites of mine so I decided to enrich my reading diet further by investigating some of these new titles.

 

Arc d'X begins like a straightforward historical novel as we follow the life of Sally Hemmings in the Jefferson house. At about 50 pages in, she runs away to the west where she encounters a Native American tribe that has never encountered white or black people. Not completely historically accurate, but nothing outrageous.

Then the story takes a sharp turn towards the weird. Sally goes to sleep and wakes up in an alternate early 1990s (when the book was published) universe. She’s at the scene of a murder where we meet a couple of cops, one of whom, Wade, is black. He then becomes the protagonist and we follow him around the city, called Aeonopolis, which is ruled over by a cabal of priests.

There’s a subplot about an archivist who steals a bunch of sacred texts and holds them for ransom. The story zooms around to Paris where we meet a mathematician obsessed with time and then on to Germany and a guy mysteriously named Erickson.

Throughout all of it are themes such as race, freedom, and sexual obsession.
 
Arc d’X wasn’t bad but it also just wasn’t my cup of tea. I failed to draw a meaningful throughline from one scenario to the next.

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The last time I went to the supermarket, I did so at a time that I normally don’t go – early in the morning. Stockers were stocking and facing the shelves as expected. Then I walked by the cat litter aisle and saw this:

 

A robot was slowly creeping up the aisle, presumably taking an inventory of the shelves and logging prices. Despite its mundane duties, the thing gave me the willies as I was reminded me of The Crawler in the novel Annihilation even though it was doing shopkeeping tasks and not scrawling cryptic phrases on the shelves. There was something creepy about those blue “eyes” staring at you. I quickly hoped that it had been programmed with Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics one of which is that robots cannot harm people.

My mind briefly jumped to a Blade Runner-like scene where I was administering the Voigt-Kampf Test to it.

Me: You’re heading down the produce aisle and you look down and see an aubergine.

Robot: An aubergine? What’s that?

Me: You know what an eggplant is?

Robot: Of course!

Me: Same thing.

Video calls, self-driving cars, pocket computer/phone/camera devices, vibrators that can be activated from the other side of the planet – I never watched 2001, Total Recall, and Sleeper thinking any of those things would be available in my lifetime and yet here we are.

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On recent bike rides, I’ve been cruising around town taking pictures of ordinary yet interesting things. Well, interesting to me, anyway. For instance, I’ve been photographing mosaic entryways that have text on them such as this one.

This entryway to the McCarthy Building on the east side belongs to a barber shop these days and I am unsure when the storefront last housed a pharmacy. The building dates to 1907 so I would hazard a guess and say it's pre-World War II.

On my last ride, I was on a mission to take a photo of the Hobbit house out on the west side. Here it is.

In another reminder that I have reached a certain age, my first thought upon seeing it was to be jealous of the surely low heating and cooling bills the owners pay. Oddly enough, a co-worker of mine knew the guy who built the house. When he explained that the gentleman constructed it in c.1980 as a reaction to the energy crisis, I felt my envy to have been validated. Notice how the Little Free Library out front looks just like it.

Across the street I found this painting on a garage door owned, perhaps, by an adherent to panspermia.

On my way home, I walked my bike around the Capitol Square and environs peeking into entryways for more mosaics. I came across what is surely the last gaslight in town.

Sadly, the lovely 100+ year-old building to which it belongs is set to be demolished, a victim of the cruelest of ironies for a new Wisconsin Historical Society museum is to replace it. To paraphrase a certain U.S. Army major in Vietnam, it became necessary to destroy Wisconsin history to save it.

Walking by the Hovde Building, I noticed these panels placed vertically between windows that feature a lamp above a power generator and bolts of electricity zapping their way above it.

These terra cotta panels date back to when the building was home to Wisconsin Power and Light. Thankfully, this building does not have a date with the wrecking ball.

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A couple recent movies I’ve watched at home.

Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché is a look at the life of Poly Styrene, a.k.a. - Marianne Joan Elliott-Said. She was the leader of the punk band X-Ray Spex. It delves deeply into her life as a woman in the very male world of punk rock as well her bi-racial identity in a white culture, which is something that attracted my Frau to the movie.

Ahead of her time in many ways, Poly Styrene’s life was full of ups and downs. This interesting tale ends on a sad note. She died at the age of 53 back in 2011.

Halloween season will be here before you know it so I got a jump on things and watched The Cursed.

 

It begins with a French officer being shot in a battle during World War I. The doctor performing surgery finds a mysterious silver bullet inside the man in addition to the lead ones that the Germans put in him.

We then flash back to the late 19th century and an awful, malicious aristocrat who kills a group of Gypsies that have a legitimate claim to some of the land he calls his own. His children become plagued with nightmares and a beast begins to roam the countryside.

The Cursed is a spine-tingling, disturbing, yet highly fun Gothic horror tale of the old school variety. Highly recommended.

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Bonus photo. Here are Grabby and Piper relaxing on the couch.