Consideration of Works Past: The Revolving Boy

(Picture from here.)

By now it cannot be a secret that I like small stories.

These are stories where there might be a major cataclysm, catastrophe, war or other great event but that is backdrop. It might impact the story and the characters. It might not.

But the story of the characters is what interests me.

I read The Revolving Boy when I was a boy. It had resonance with me then. It has resonance with me now.

The author of TRB is Gertrude Friedberg. That's about as much as I can say. The wiki article says she wrote two plays that were well received-- one, Three Cornered Moon, had Ruth Gordon in it and was almost immediately made into a film. She wrote three SF stories and one novel. She was admired but, as far as I can tell, doesn't have much impression on the internet as a person.

This is a shame. I would love to know more about her.

I do know a lot about The Revolving Boy in that I've read it more than once recently.

First, like any SF book of that era, it has a lot of SF tropes like flying cars, fancy home machines and the like. I think the problem with a lot of those works is people didn't expect to actually reach the future. One of the interesting things about current near future fiction is its conservatism: people have read those dated works and don't want to have their own works suffer the same fate.

But Friedberg wrote TRB in 1966 and she was fifty-two. She'd already seen how works dated. Much of the future stuff is a bit over the top. I suspect Friedberg was having fun.

That said, it's a minor criticism and can be easily overlooked.

The book is the story of Derv Nagy from his early childhood until his late middle age. As I said, this is a small book. The big things happen around in his life and don't necessarily affect him all that much. The book is tightly focused on Derv.

Derv is born (and expresses at an early age) a marvelous sense of absolute direction.  He can tell north without thinking about it. He feels twisted over the course of daily life relative to his sense of direction-- to the point of unwinding over the day.

Later in his life (early in the book so I'm not giving much away) he determines that his sense of direction is relative to something absolute. He doesn't know what it is. He only knows where it is and he must bend his life around that direction.

Friedberg has done something remarkable here. She takes something as simple as a sense of direction and pins it down as a pivot around which someone orients his life in a very real, physical way. By doing this, she shows us how people are bent by simple things. It's easy to extrapolate from this to higher moral conundrums but she does not. She stays with this simple, fundamental thing Derv must accommodate. Derv revolves.

Derv is a true character. He has a sense of humor. Like anyone, he tries to find his place (and a place for his uniqueness) in the world. He does not become a hero or a captain of industry. He finds love. He finds a life. He finds a job. There is nothing dramatic in what he does except where those things are dramatic to him.

There were a couple of things I pulled from this book-- reinforced by other books I was reading at the same time. Derv reminds me of Huckleberry Finn. Huck also makes his way through his life. He does not accomplish great things. The world is not greatly changed by his passing through it any more (or any less) than Derv's world is changed. Raintree County is another book I read at the same time.

What these books have in common is the placement character in the context of the larger world. The world is unchanged by their movement through it-- and that is just fine. Most of us don't change the world much. We change our little piece of it in our friends, our family, our children.

I have no illusion that my writing will change the world-- it won't. The wheel of the world will go on pretty much unswerved by anything I do. But I do like to thing I have made some things, some people, some situations, a little better for me having passed through by. No doubt those changes will be swallowed up by time. I don't have a problem with that.

I never knew Gertrude Friedberg. I wish I had so I could tell her that her book made a difference to me. And I hope that difference will shine through my own work and further its effect, as little as any effect I have might be.

While the differences she made will likely outlive my own, they won't last a thousand years.

So what? What does?

Doing

Okay. I've been home a month now.

Things have settled out some. There's no longer the issue of feeling anxious until I start to work. My desk had three monitors on it but I can only use one at home. That took more accommodation than I expected.

Being home with my wife is nice. But I find I miss the commute.

I took the train in and out every day. 90 minutes, one way. About 50 minutes on the actual rail plus 30 minutes, plus or minus, on the subway, walking or biking. I didn't much care for the subway but getting a good half hour workout by getting to work was worth the deal.

The 50 minutes was where I did most of my writing.

Now, at home, I have no defined time for that and my writing has suffered. I've managed to get an hour in just before work but it's been hard to increase it.

But there have been other issues. One is what I call the Urge to be Doing.

For me, there are a number of itches that need to be scratched in my life. Time with people. Writing. Work. And, doing things. By this I mean doing something beyond what needs to be done just to keep going. Work, writing, time with people-- these are necessary actions of living. Doing things is one step beyond that. It could be as simple as making a new base for a lamp. Or making something out of a worn out pair of shoes. Or going fishing. Or taking a walk in a new place. Or seeing an art exhibit. Sometimes, it's this blog.

The instant something moves into the has to be done category, it falls out of the category of doing things.

A couple of weeks I found myself itching to do something. Go for a walk or a bike ride? Weather was awful. Can't go out to see something-- social distancing.

So I went into the shop and made the pen and tiny bowl above.

These are not great works of art. The pen is made from some black birch I had lying around. Birch is soft in general and this wood seems especially porous. I probably should have stabilized the wood, first. But I've been having a little trouble with my lathe tools and stabilized wood feels like turning a rock. So I was lazy and didn't do it. The pen came out okay but not great.

The bowl was nicer. It was from a piece of plum wood I had saved when we had to cut down some fruit trees. (See here.) The wood is multicolored and has a slight tinge of pink. Unfortunately, the wood developed a crack as I was turning it. I finished it and it is usable as a little pill bowl but it's, again, not great.

That said, I felt great afterwards.

I had done something.

I think it's important these days that we remember it's not enough to do what we must do to survive. To make sure we and our loved ones are safe. We must also live. We must satisfy those itches and needs.

I've been doing a lot of teleconferencing at work and over time people have quit using their cameras. It's not surprising as video taxes the network and servers of most of the teleconferencing applications.

But I hate it.

I've been home for a month. I've seen my wife, dog and cat regularly. A couple of times I've seen my son. The only other human visual contact I've had is via these teleconferences. To see a blank screen with someone's initials just doesn't satisfy that need.

Humans are not solitary creatures. We need other human beings like we need oxygen to breathe.

So talk to each other.

State of the Farm: Grape Pruning, 2020

I spoke a few weeks back how I'd pruned the grapes. (See here.) At that time I said I would go into it more when I was able to upload the pictures.

Well, the pictures are uploaded now. Heck, they were uploaded a few days after that blog entry. But COVID-19 intervened.

So I said to myself: Self! It's time to get those pictures up. Things are budding. In just a week they're going to be out of date.

Here they are.

The first picture, up at the top, shows what I started with. Recall, we had grapes from the Concord but they were little and puny and there was a fungus problem. I surmised the problem was, at least in part, that the vine had become too thick. Not enough light and air movement for the grapes to grow in a healthy way.

In this picture, you can see the branches are all over the place. It's interesting that where the branches were the thickest is where the grapes had the most difficulty-- evidence for my hypothesis.

This picture was taken about half way through the process.

A lot of grape vines are designed to maximize production of a few, very high quality bunches. That's why you see very spare vines in the vineyards.

I've take a somewhat different tack. I have limited space so I can't sacrifice a hundred feet of many grape vines for twenty pounds of grapes. I need to have this vine produce fifty pounds of grapes in the space I have.

Consequently, I've thinned the vine down to a few strong horizontal leaders. But there are still some crosses-- vine branches that cross one another.

This is where I stopped. I could have trimmed more aggressively. There's a little complex towards the second bar I could have brought from three to one. I decided to wait and see. From that complex, the lower branch goes along the top wire. The middle goes up towards the top bar. The left branch turns back towards the camera on the other side of the top wire. I'm asking a a lot of that complex so we'll see.

The next picture is not the Concord but the Marechal-Fochs vine. We got a good harvest from that last year and I did very little.

This is an extremely vigorous vine. The structure here is sort of like a house in that there are slanted faces to the east and west. (The Concord slants towards the south.)

There are two vines here, one at each corner of the far side of the "house." Between the two of them, cover both sides of the "house" and follow the fence and terminate below that green garden stake in the foreground.

I decided I need do nothing about it this year.

That said, I may regret that decision. The weather has been chancy over the last few years and one of the effects of this is to have different sections of the vines ripen at different times. And it's possible I'm just asking too much of them. But I like the vine going everywhere. It fights with me and tries to take over the pears. It tried to take over the cherry. It's a tough customer.

Okay. That's it for now.