The Situation Escalates

After 10 rewarding months with a 45 pound slam ball, I now have had a 100 pound slam ball for 3 hours.

The 100-pounder is just slightly larger than the 45-pounder, which is about the size of a basketball. Both of them can go slightly non-round, because they're not fully inflated, so they don't bounce, not even when you slam them down to the floor with all your might, hence the term slam ball. Although, the heavier they get, the more common it is to call them dead balls rather than slam balls, and the less common it is to actually slam them. Slamming a ball expends much more energy than simply lifting it, and very few people actually slam dead balls which weigh as much as 100 pounds. Lifting them is plenty of work.

Lifting a 100 pound ball is much more difficult than lifting a 100 pound dumbbell. I have made many visits to a local used-sporting-goods store, looking for a good deal on a heavy ball, and they usually have 100 pound dumbbells, and I can lift them with no problem. Several reps with each hand of a 100 pound dumbbell row:

-- is not a big deal for me. Lifting this 100 pound ball with both hands has been a big deal. I can do it, but after doing it once, I put the ball down again very soon and really, really don't want to do it again. Several dumbell rows on each side leaves me feeling refreshed and energized and pleasantly tingly. Lifting the 100 pound ball off of the ground with both hands and holding it off of the ground for just a couple a seconds makes me hurt all over and want very badly to take a long nap.

This is good. This is how muscles get stronger.

I found the wooden box containing the ball standing on the sidewalk in front of my house in the pouring rain today. I don't know whether Fedex even tried to get it up into the porch. There are are only 2 small steps up from the sidewalk to to the porch.

At first I tried to get the box into the porch using a dolly, but one of the dolly's wheels fell off, so I just lifted it up and took a step or two and set it down inside the porch.

And that's been about the extent of my workout with this "beast." "Beast" is a very common term used appreciatively to describe dead balls which weigh 100 pounds or more -- or even 50 pounds. What I mean when I say that that's been about the extent of it, is that I've lifted it off of the ground several times, using the correct technique so that I lift with my legs and don't hurt my back. I haven't even tried yet to lift it higher than knee-level. I will do many more such low-level lifts, just getting the thing off of the ground, before I even try to get it to chest level. After chest level comes onto the shoulder. Then pressed overhead. Then maybe slamming, or maybe that would just really be an absurd thing to try. Anyway, it will be a while before I have to decide whether or not to slam a 100-pounder.

My readers: are you beginning to feel the awesomeness of this sort of fitness equipment? Or do you suspect that there may in fact be nothing awesome about balls as compared to dumbbells or barbells, and that I may be wrong to think otherwise? You know what? You may be right. Then again, maybe I'm right, and in any case, I'm having a lot of fun, and getting stronger. I strongly encourage you to see for yourself. Medicine balls can be had in every conceivable weight from 1/2 pound all the way up to 300 pounds. Compare a ball of any weight to a dumbbell or barbell of the same weight, and immediately you'll see what a huge difference the different shape makes.

Unanswered Questions About Petronius

It's relatively rare that a book is read by as many as a million people. Big-budget movies which aren't seen by millions of people, on the other hand, are flops. Federico Fellini made big-budget movies which definitely weren't flops. Although the novel is almost 2000 years aold, and the film about 40 years old, I think it is fairly safe to say that more people have seen Fellini's movie Satyricon than have read the work by Petronius on which it is based -- loosely based, Fellini has the decency to say right there in the credits.

No, I don't like Fellini's Satyricon. I don't like Fellini's movies in general. Neither did Pauline Kael. Kael made the argument, which I second, that Fellini never bothered much to develop the characters in his movies, because the main character in every Fellini movie is Fellini. If you find Fellini himself to be absolutely fascinating, as he himself clearly did, then there's a chance that you might like some of his movies almost as much as he did -- and oh, what it must be like to love a movie that much! If, on the other hand, you find Fellini to have been a fatuous egomaniac, come on ever here and have a seat by me and Pauline.

In addition to the egomania, there's the grotesquerie. Fellini loved to look at freaks, at deformed people, people who were very fat or very thin, people with huge scars or boils, etc, etc. I don't, so much. I really appreciate how, in most movies and TV shows, most of the people are ridiculously good-looking and impossibly perfect, in many cases much more perfect-looking than the actors who are skillfully altered to look that way. I get more than my fill of grotesque reality away from the screen.

So, first I saw Fellini's Satyricon, and was greatly disappointed, because I assumed that my disgust meant that I would also find Petronius' Satyricon to be disgusting. Then I read Kael's review of Fellini's Satyricon, which gave me hope that there was much in Petronius' version which I might like, which Fellini had missed. Then I began to perceive that many, perhaps most film critics disagreed with Kael, about Fellini and about a lot of other things. A while after that, I ceased to care very much what most film critics think, about Kael or about anything else. Later, I noticed that the Latin and Greek passage quoted at the beginning of TS Eliot's "Waste Land" is a quote of Trimalchio. By that time, I had begun to think somewhat less of Eliot than I once had, but diciphering that passage both made me think a little more of him again, and made me want to read Petronius. (Is the passage in Fellini's film? If so, I slept through it.) So I read Petronius.

That is to say, of course: I read what remains of Petronius. 195 pages in Konrad Mueller's corrected fourth Teubner edition of 2003.

Which brings us to some unanswered questions about Petronius and his poem. Unanswered as far as I know. As always, if you want to be sure, ask experts, and I'm not one. How long was the Satyricon when it was whole? I believe the best guesses there are: at least several times as long as those 195 pages, perhaps ten times as long, perhaps more. Which would make the Satyricon longer than War and Peace but not quite as long as the Old and New Testament together.

Who was this Petronius who wrote this novel? Yes, boys and girls, it's a novel. The novel wasn't invented by Fielding. Or by Cervantes. Or by Rabelais. Or, for that matter, by the ancient Romans. They got the idea from the Greeks. Was it the Petronius Arbiter who was the style advisor to the Emperor and would-be artist Nero, who was obliged to commit suicide in AD 66, when Nero suspected him of plotting against him? (Did Nero suspect correctly?) That Petronius was not yet 40 years old when he died -- assuming that he is our author, what more might he have written, if the rotten Nero had been wiped out first?

Oh, and by the way, just in case this wasn't already completely clear: read it, by all means read it, it's staggeringly good.

What would our author think of Fellini's film? Did Fellini understand Petronius better than Pauline and I, after all? Has my squeamishness blinded me to vast realms of aesthetic and artistic edification? Has it lead me to read a version of the novel which is pale and anemic and quite unlike the author's intent?

And by the way, here's a question which stopped me dead in my tracks over 30 years ago, and which has bothered me ever since, a question I have not been able to even begin to answer: Why do so many of us grown-ups expend so much time and energy discussing made-up stories with such fearful earnestness? How serious a question was it for me at the time? Well, it struck me as an undergraduate right in the middle of an honors English class,right in the middle of something particularly pretentious which I was saying to the professor and the class, and English was one of my double majors. So, it was, and remains, what you might call a rather dramatic existential crisis.

Onward: more questions: would we have more of the novel today, had Poggio never lived, or never learned to read? Yes, him again: Poggio discovered part of what we know of Petrobius today, in 1420. The manuscript he found was copied, and then, of course, Poggio lost it. Additional manuscript discoveries in the 16th and 17th centuries brought the text to the length it has today. Scholars continue to work on the text, and the condition of the manuscripts continues to give them plenty to do.

Are the manuscripts so scanty because Petronius wrote for a small, private audience? Did so much of the text come to light so late because there's so much gay sex in it? Yes, there's also quite a bit of hetero sex, and violence, in the story, but Christian authorities have always objected more strongly to sex in literature athan to violence, and more strong to gay sex than to heterosexuality.

And, of course, there remains that favorite question of mine: Will still more of the text come to light?

Dream Log: Commercial Success as a Writer

Last night, while I was still awake, there were some noises just outside, and I couldn't figure out what they were. Then I fell asleep. I dreamed that I had suddenly become very successful, commercially, as writer. In the dream I was an adult, but I was living, by myself, in the house I lived in from the late 1960's to the mid-1970's, from age eight to fourteen, a large house with a very large front lawn. It was nighttime. Many people were coming to congratulate me. Many, who arrived in huge 1940's automobiles, identified themselves as distant cousins of mine. Typewriter copies of many things I had written pre-Internet were laying around here and there in the house, paper-clipped to handwritten comments by various people. I kept trying to read some of these comments, but the handwriting was hard to read, and I was constantly being interrupted by the many visitors.

In addition to the many visitors, many congratulatory gifts had been sent to me. The packages were piled high on the porch. I had received 300-pound

slam balls, gold and platinum watches, all sorts of hard-to-find books.

My distant cousins took me to a time machine. In real life, when I lived in this house, behind it were cornfields. In the dream, behind it was an urban residential area with narrow streets and small houses. The nearest small house was a time machine.

I went back into my house, went through a maze of hallways and stairways to reach a small room with a piano in it, with shelves on two walls crammed with sheet music. This room was crowded with people singing American songs from the early 20th century to piano accompaniment. Among these singers was Gore Vidal, wearing a tuxedo with the bow tie undone and the collar open. As soon as he saw me, Gore said, "They're going to turn you in to Langley!"

Langley, Virginia is the site of the headquarters of the CIA. Gore did not literally mean that, as soon as my distant cousins and I got to wherever we were going in the future, they were planning to hand me over to the CIA. What he meant was that these distant cousins of mine were right-wing reactionaries, and that I belonged with Leftists such as himself and the others singing in that small room.

I was going to start to try to explain to Gore that these distant cousins of mine were much more liberal than he thought, but instead I woke up.

Alternative-Energy Developments in Ann Arbor

Christopher Taylor, Mayor of Ann Arbor, has announced -- well, I don't know whether he's announced a "resolve," or actual concrete plans, to put solar panels on the rooftops of all the public buildings in town. Either way, part of that project was completed four days ago, when volunteers from the University of Michigan and the Ann Arbor community helped to install rooftop solar panels on the roof of one of the stations of the Ann Arbor Fire Department.

US Representative Debbie Dingell was there, and posted about it on Facebook, and, of course, one of the right-wing trolls who are all over Michigan Democrats on Facebook immediately complained about this "waste of taxpayer money," and why didn't Dingell yada yada instead. I read a few of the replies to this troll, which of course pointed out that these solar panels will save taxpayer money by generating electricity which the taxpayers have been buying from a utility. I stopped reading the replies to the troll before I noticed any mention that Dingell had linked a story about people volunteering to install the panels, which of course saved the taxpayers even more money. And if you've read the news story I linked above, you already know that in addition to working for free, students and local residents also raised several thousand dollars toward the cost of the installation.

In the past several months I have suddenly ratcheted my interest in electric vehicles, known to us aficionados as EV's, way up. I've been paying a lot more attention to the vehicles within a mile or so of where I live, which I suppose is one of the more left-wing 2-miles circles in the US, but which is also very close to downtown Detroit, and has always had a very deeply-entrenched internal-combustion culture. I've seen quite a few Tesla Model 3's since June. How many is "quite a few"? I don't know. I'm sorry. I've seen at least one Tesla Model X. I've seen several Toyota Leaf's, several Chevrolet Bolts and several Chevrolet Volts, and some BMW i3's, and a few other EV's.

Those are all vehicles running strictly on electricity, Although the Volt also has a small gasoline engine which isn't really necessary, except, presumably, to reassure buyers who don't really know how EV's work. (They work just fine without any gasoline at all, believe it or not.)

Then there are the hybrids in Ann Arbor. The city buses are biodiesel hybrids. I have noticed a few hybrids from Ford and Honda, and one BMW i8 which looks like it wandered onto the street off of a seriously-fast racetrack. I talked to the driver, who said, yes, it was very very fast and fun to drive, but who seemed tired of talking about it, as if strangers were constantly asking him about his car, so I tried to give him a break, said thanks and broke off the conversation early. [ PS, 24 October 2019: I forgot to mention that I've seen a couple of Toyota Camry hybrids and one Hyundai Ioniq hybrid.]

And then there are the Priuses. Toyota has manufactured millions of units of the Prius since 1997 -- how many million? I don't know, and I don't know why I'm having such difficulty finding a reliable figure. And I certainly don't know why so many statistics on Wikipedia having to do with things like solar and wind energy and EV's and hybrids stop at around 2016 or 2017. That's ridiculous. It's like having statistics about computers up until 1983.

Be all of that as it may: there are about 3 million Priuses within a one mile radius of my home. I'm kidding, but there are a lot. A lot.

A few days ago I spoke to a nice lady who drives a Toyota Prius+ and does not seem at all tired of talking about it. I asked her what sort of mileage she got. She said 30 or 40 miles. At first I thought she meant 30 or 40 miles per gallon of gasoline, but no, what she meant was that she charges the car overnight in her garage, and then it goes 30 or 40 miles before the gasoline engine starts. The + in the car's name means you can plug it in. (Does her house run on solar, I wondered but didn't ask.) And, she added, the gasoline engine doesn't start very often. She rarely drives that far in a day. She said she got a full tank of gas four months ago, and still has 3/4 of a tank.

If this nice lady has driven 3000 miles in the past four months, an average of 24 miles a day for 125 days, and if her Prius has used 5 gallons of gasoline over those 3000 miles -- that's 600 miles per gallon.

A lot of the EV enthusiasts I've been hanging out with lately are obsessed with getting longer range per charge from EV's, and the range of EV's is increasing very rapidly. 5 years ago, 100 per charge was pretty good. For a brand-new EV today, in a lot people's opinions, 200 miles is pathetic. This would make sense if they were all driving across Alaska, the Yukon and British Columbia all the time, or across Mongolia, but they're not. I'm one of a vocal minority, but definitely still a minority, who think that the obsession with range is sort of getting out of hand. For longe-range vacations and business trips, charging stations are beginning to sprout everywhere like gas stations, and they're not stopping. The EV revolution is underway.

For these EV enthusiasts, among whom it is usual to want more, more, MORE RANGE!!!!! it is also usual to be very frustrated at the continued success of the Prius, when there are completely gasoline-free EV's are available. I wonder how many Prius+ owners get 600 miles to the gallon, and I wonder how much the EV enthusiasts know about real-world Prius gas consumption.

Also on the topic of opinions and awareness: it seems that the general public don't realize how fast EV's are. A new Tesla is faster from 0-60 than any internal-combustion car which costs less than a million dollars or so. But also very sedate-looking EV's like the Chevy Bolt

accelerate more quickly than just about any ICEV's (as we call internal-combustion-engine vehicles) which can be had for less than six figures. Priuses are slow, as people tend to know by now because there are 35 million of them (I'm exaggerating, but I don't know by how much), but EV's are an entirely different thing. They tend to be ridiculously quick, which is among the reasons to stop obsessively loading them with such large battery packs, which give them the lusted-after long range per change, and make them ridiculously quick, and also very heavy, and also more expensive than they really need to be.

Still, ridiculously fast, overweight and all, a new EV doesn't necessarily have to be very expensive any more. Especially not after a big fat Federal rebate, and possibly state and local rebates as well. It's like with solar energy: people need to resort to more and more ridiculous arguments in order to put EV's down.

Latin Authors from Spain

Roman conquest of Spain began in 218 BC, as Rome battled with Carthage for dominance in the Western Mediterranean, and continued until -- when? The answer may depend partly upon one's political position. Some would say that the conquest was complete, for all intents and purposes, within a century; others, that it was never complete. From how long and to what extent earlier native languages were spoken in Spain, and in which proportions those languages were Celtic, or Basque, or unclassified Iberian, or others, I do not know.

In the first century AD, quite a number of the most prominent authors in the Latin language happened to come from Spain: Pomponius Mela (died ca AD 45), the earliest known Roman geographer; Columella (AD 4 -- 70), who wrote a lengthy work on agriculture; Lucan (30 -- 65), author of a very popular epic poem about the Roman civil war; Martial (born between 38 and 41 -- died between 102 and 104), who authored many witty epigrams; Quintilian (ca 35 -- ca 100), one of the most prominent of the Roman rhetoricians; and, most prominent of all, the Senecas, father and son. Seneca the Elder wrote memoirs and a history of Rome; Seneca the Younger wrote quite a wide variety of works: philosophy, drama, moralizing letters and satire penned by him survive to this day.

Later Spaniards who wrote and published in Latin include the Christian theologian Priscillian, sometime Bishop of Ávila (died 385); the poet Prudentius (died between ca 405 and 413); and the widely-traveled historian Orosius (c 375 -- died after 418). 4th-century Latin authors from Spain whose works have not survived to the present day, but are praised by contemporaries, include Juvencus, a poet who now cannot be dated more exactly than the 4th century[PS, 23 October 2019: I erred: A poem by Juvencus has survived, a verse rendering of the Gospel narrative about 3200 verses long, composed ca AD 330. Thank you once again, Reddit!] ; and the poet Latronianus (Died 385).

I have written elsewhere on this blog of the prolific Saint Isidore of Seville (ca 560 -- 636), beloved by Christian for many works, and by Classicists for his Etymologie, which, although it fails pretty spectacularly in the goal expressed in its title, to accurately trace the origins of words, none the less success brilliantly as an encyclopedia and as a repository of fragments of ancient works which otherwise are lost to us; and of Pope Sylvester II (ca 946 -- 1003), known earlier as Gerbert, one of the most brilliant scientists of the Middle Ages.

The Toledo School of Translators were responsible for many of the Latin translations from Arabic and ancient Greek which transformed the curricula of the Sorbonne and other Western universities beginning in the 13th century. Perhaps the foremost of these translator at Toledo was Gerard of Cremona, who fashioned Latin versions of many Greek and Arabic scientific works.

Alfonso X of Castile, also known as Alfonso the Wise, took over the leadership of the translation school in the 13th century (he reigned from 1252 to 1284), and, although Latin writing certainly flourished under him and for a long time afterwards in Spain, his cultivation of the Castilian vernacular is so greatly, and understandably, celebrated, that it obscures, from the feeble view of your humble scribe, many of the particulars of this Latin culture, and so, for the nonce, he must pause here.

Peter Handke

I'm angry, and today it's not just because I didn't win the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature, but also because of who did win it: Peter Handke.

In case you don't know who Handke is, let me get you caught up real quick:

He was born in Austria in 1942. In the early 1960's he began to make a name for himself with his long hair and with a play he he wrote which consisted of actors insulting the audience, entitled "Insulting the Audience." That play was followed in very quick succession by other plays, by stories, novels and screenplays. They didn't all directly insult the audience; in fact Handke wrote and continues to write in a wide variety of styles. Most of his works have one thing in common: they're sort of mysterious, you can't really tell what he's getting at. Or maybe those few readers who always intensely disliked him were simply sharper then the rest of us, and could see what he was getting at, right from the start.

Be that as it may: all of a sudden, in 1995, by which time Handke had become extremely popular, he published a book in which what he was getting at was suddenly, horribly clear. This man who until then had strictly avoided politics in his writing, even entitling one of his books I am an Inhabitant of the Ivory Tower, suddenly jumped right into the middle of world politics and worldwide political journalism when he published a book entitled Gerechtigkeit fuer Serbien. That translates to Justice for Serbia. That's right: in 1995, right in the middle of genocidal atrocities of the Milosevic regime, Handke wrote a book complaining that Serbia was being treated unfairly. Serbia, and not the men, women and children Serbia was deporting and massacring.

Naturally, this was such a shock that for a little while, many of Handke readers, myself included, wondered whether we had really understood him. However, since 1995 he has repeatedly made himself ever more clear on the matter: the victims in the 1990's in the former Yugoslavia, Handke assures us, were the Serbians. Milosevic even gave him a medal.

But apparently it's still all just too much for many readers to take in, and so, a very great reading public continues to behave as if Handke had never said such things, or even as if the Serbian atrocities had never occurred, as if they had been made up, as Barry Levinson said in his stupidest film, Wag the Dog.

I understand: it's just awkward to face the fact that your favorite author, who had always seemed like such a far-out Leftist hippie, is actually a racist, fascist and genocide denier. So awkward that many readers, and the Swedish Academy, have simply not faced it. This is a shameful day for the Academy, and a bad day for everyone except mass murderers.

Are Right-Wingers Basically Just Lonely Old Guys?

A Facebook friend expressed the opinion that many of Trump's fanatical supporters are lonely old white men with no friends, no support group. I think he may be on to something, and I think it may apply to more than just Trump's hard-core base.

I just spoke to my brother today. Yesterday I'd left him a voicemail saying it was about time for "our monthly time to disagree about... everything." My brother is not part of Trump's hard-core base; he belongs to the part of Trump's support that hates him, but still supports him because they hate Democrats much more (that group probably also include many Republican Senators and Congresspeople). My brother's a libertarian loonie who believes in worldwide conspiracies of Evil being run by Hillary, Soros, Israel and The Media.

So I screamed at him for a half hour or so on the phone, telling him repeatedly that he has his head up his ass and doesn't know shit about politics, history or culture, then he said he had to go and I told him I loved him and to take care, and sorry about the yelling.

And most likely, in November we'll do it again.

Actually we don't disagree about absolutely everything. He's a scientist and doesn't deny that humans cause global warming and need to stop it. I repeatedly make a point of acknowledging that he is well-informed about science, technology, engineering and math, highly educated in those areas. He agrees with me that Trump is both an idiot and a career criminal. We both hate Elon Musk, although probably not for identical reasons.

Anyway, if my friend is on to something here, if there's a basic link between right-wing lunacy and loneliness, maybe we all should be calling our crazy right-wing relatives more often, and hugging them more and reminding them more often that we love them even though their heads are completely up their asses.

Maybe even scream at them a little bit less, although I'm not totally sure about that part. That would be asking a lot.

Dream Log: Thandie Newton in a Grandiose Mall

Last night I dreamed I was in a shopping mall. I've had several dreams set in malls, and usually I haven't liked being there, but last night's mall was different. I don't know whether there is any real place on Earth like this mall. Each story was at least 30 feet high, there were terraces and aerial walkways and atriums, the interior walls shimmered in a variety of gorgeous colors.

There were a lot of movie stars in this mall. Some of them owned stores in the mall. Thandie Newton owned a store and seemed to spend a lot of her time there, which didn't seem so strange, because, again, the surroundings were beautiful. Thandie's store carried cosmetics, about which I know little, so I felt a little awkward and out of place in the store. Thandie seemed very glad that I was there, though; she and several of her friends kept tackling me, holding me down on the floor and tickling me. It was pretty nice. Then Thandie motioned for her friends to leave us alone, and she lay on top of me on the floor, and all of a sudden I realized that her feelings for me were more than just playful. I was surprised and flattered.

Then I was playing keep away with some young male movie stars, with a ball a little bit smaller than a basketball. I didn't know their names because they are young and I am old. All of us were wearing suits which had come from another of the mall's stores. We were playing outside of that store. Suddenly someone tackled me and lay on top of me on the floor. After a moment I saw that it was Matt Damon, wearing an very, very nice-looking black suit with a white shirt and blue tie. Matt said to me, in a low voice so that no one else heard, that Thandie liked me. Really, really liked me. "And," he added, "she's pregnant. And..." Matt paused, not sure how to go on.

I finished his thought: "That's right, Thandie and I have never had sex, so someone else is the father."

"Right."

"But she has feelings for me."

"Right."

To my own surprise, the thought of being with Thandie and helping her to raise a baby fathered by someone else appealed powerfully to me.

The young movie stars and Matt Damon suddenly started rushing along to some destination unknown to me, carrying me along in their current. I felt that I was walking along in stockinged feet, and I wanted to stop and get some shoes to match the new suit I was wearing. As I was being swept along I saw some men's shoes in a storefront. But then I looked down and saw that I had been wearing a pair of elegant shoes the whole time. The shoes were so light that it had felt as if I was not wearing shoes.

With some effort I broke free from the roaring stream of youthful actors, and tried to go straight back to Thandie's store, but I got lost. I couldn't find my way around in the enormous mall at all. I knew that Thandie's store was on the 2nd floor, but I couldn't even tell which floor I was on at any given time. Finally I asked someone for directions. And after asking several more people for directions, I found Thandie's store.

It had become dark. I assumed this was because the mall was closing, or had closed. I saw Thandie's sillouette from some distance away. I called out: "This is going to sound like we're in high school: Matt says you like me."

Thandie replied, "Were a lot of your classmates pregnant in high school?"

"Probably," I said, "but they managed to keep it from me."

"So what do you think?" Thandie asked.

"I think it's wonderful that you like me. I'm in," I said, and I sat down beside her. "I was trying to run right straight back to you since Matt told me. But I kept getting lost. I think it's true what they say: that it's for the best when the woman picks the man."

"Who says that?" Thandie asked, as I sat down beside her.

"Well... I do. And people who agree with me about that."

"You feel the same about me?"

"Honestly, I had never thought about you that way, but I'm feeling more and more, every moment. I'm here. I'm in. Yes. Yes. Yes. That's how I feel."

"I'm a mess."

"No," I said, "you're really not," and I woke up.

Dream Log: Huge Little Italy

I dreamed I was in Little Italy in Lower Manhattan in the 1970's, but in my dream, Little Italy was much bigger, covered much more ground, than the real one.

I went into a restaurant which belonged to the family of a friend of mine, which by itself covered about as much ground as the real Little Italy. I came in off the street into a conventionally-sized dining area painted white, in which a dozen or so heavy-set people were seated, all facing away from me. A door in the back of this dining room led to the main part of the restaurant a semi-private place -- you didn't need a membership, but it was good if you knew somebody -- with many more rooms, some big, some small, and with halls and staircases going up and down, going on and on, with other dining areas which were not strictly separated from food-prep areas. Once past the white dining room in front, the colors of the walls and floors were earthy: a lot of varnished wood, a lot of red-brown paint. Here and there young couples sat and embraced.

Exiting the back of the restaurant, and making a couple of right-angle turns in alleys, I emerged into a large park. The whole area, like the semi-private part of the restaurant, looked lived-in and worn, but solid. The grass in the park was a little bit scruffy. Only a little bit. It looked more comfortable than messy, like a sofa which was obviously old, but not yet full of holes.

As I walked on, I saw at one edge of the park, to my surprise, a row of small houses, looking very much like the houses in some neighborhoods in Queens, New York, and in a hundred other cities in the US, but most unusual, to say the least, in Lower Manhattan. Then I looked a bit closer and saw, through the front windows, rubble piled up inside the small houses, and right away I understood that they were about to be torn down and replaced with something very different, and I thought that that was somewhat of a shame.

Further on, there was a building in a stage of collapse, about ten stories high. One exterior wall was completely gone, and there was no construction or demolition going on inside and the building was not roped off, and people were coming and going.

In this abandoned building were many items there for the taking, including some rather rather nice furniture, old telephones, lamps, file cabinets -- and many large high-ceilinged rooms were quite full of books. I naturally spent some time looking through these. I was quite disappointed, not as much because of the physical condition of the volumes, a bit dampened by long exposure to the open air, as by the texts they contained. Many of the books were bilingual, English and German, and seemed to be offering English texts for natives speakers of German, and German texts for native speakers of English, and offering generally unimpressive texts in both languages.

After I gave up the search for interesting books, I walked on and came to another park, where a group of young people were tossing footballs around -- American footballs:

They let me play catch with them.

After a while I moved on again, until I came to a place with a good view of the skyscrapers in the financial district, including the old World Trade Center twin towers, which at that time were still quite new. I stood looking at the skyscrapers for a while, thinking about the small houses nearby which were about to be torn down, and how in New York City buildings were always been torn down and built. and then I woke up.