Critical Distance

 I have asked for recision of the six foot rule.

 The request is under consideration.

The Online Grievance Industry

 Today's Nation leads with 

Rebecca Solnit’s (Mis)Adventures in the Manosphere. 

Solnit provides an historian's perspective on how most of the internet today is dominated by what is usually described as a cultural shift in how young men often see life.   She asserts that it is really an expression of economic exploitation by the billionaire media moguls.

 At the end of the article there is a link to Solnit's website. 

 The guiding principle of the website is expressed succinctly on page one:

"Every emergency is in part a storytelling emergency."

"Hope does not mean saying this is not bad, and it does not mean saying that we can defeat it. It just means saying we will keep showing up. That we will not give up. ...we do not know how it will unfold, and neither do those we oppose."   

I have enjoyed reading Solnit's columns, articles and books for a long time.  I'm pleased to have found this new-to-me trove of thoughts about the big issues of our time. 

Solnit often spends part of the summer in New Mexico.  In an August article she talks about the state's changing climate, including longer and hotter summers and air filled with smoke from wildfires. 

Breakfast at VM

 VM Coffee is the most elaborately designed of Albuquerque's many coffee shops.  The downtown location makes it most accessible by car (or bicycle for the more fit coffee drinkers).  Margaret had been treated to a brunch there recently, so she insisted we visit the place on a Saturday morning to partake of the coffee and a big carnitas burrito, which we shared.

 The fellow in charge of roasting the coffee beans treated us to a guided tour of the shop's roasting machinery in the big warehouse space behind the inner bank of widows.

 Adjacent to the shop is a large parking lot museum of vintage signs and vehicles collected and restored by the shop's owner.

Dinner at Five

 Until I got this zoomed-in shot I did not notice the missing tip of the left ear.  So a little bit of the life history is known. 

Not sure about much else, including the gender.  Looks quite healthy, with a nice coat.   Evidently a good scavenger and hunter.  

The Window Garden

 

A New Acquaintance

 I decided to try taming this feral cat that has been hanging out around our house for a month or two. 

 

I had some dry food that the dog refused to eat.  Not surprisingly, the cat was fine with it.

We mostly had seen the tail end of the cat disappearing under the deck before.  Now, it is willing to come up on deck to eat, and has even laid on the chair cushion in the sun for a bit. 

Reflection

 I am rereading El Tercer Reich by Roberto Bolaño.  The author, a Chilean, was highly respected and honored for his work.  He died at just fifty years of age.  Like many other Chileans, Bolaño lived outside his country for much of his life, probably to escape the long Pinochet dictatorship there.   The novel and an English translation were published after Bolaño's death.

I am not sure I will get all the way through El Tercer Reich again.  I recall the vocabulary being a bit challenging for me in spots.  The theme is also outside of my usual interests.  The main character is a German on vacation in Spain whose passion in life is playing war games on a big board with movable pieces and complex strategies.  The real plot, though, revolves around the acquaintances he. makes in the vacation resort.  Throughout the narrative there is an underlying sense of menace which the main character must come to grips with.

It dawned on me on picking up this novel again that my lack of comfort with a book dealing with a topic of little relevance to my own experience is likely similar to what many people may feel about my practice of making photographs with old cameras, and then writing for decades about my involvement with the topic.  (That lengthy sentence alone may be enough to repel potential readers.)

On the other hand (there always is one),  I feel I may have a slight edge on Bolaño as my writing is accompanied by illustrations related to the texts of my blog posts and which I hope will  have some stand-alone value.  

Whatever others may think of my writing and photography, there is an element of self-fulfillment from the sum total of my efforts over a period of decades.  I have over a thousand images in my Flickr photostream.  Those photographs are the ones I consider to represent my best efforts, and there is quite a purposeful variety there of subjects and techniques.  

My pictures posted on Flickr are selected mostly from posts on my blog, Photography & Vintage Film Cameras where my pictures are accompanied by commentary on photographic techniques and gear.  Everything Else (this blog) was originally conceived to let me talk about subjects other than photography, but I am increasingly posting pictures here too as my photographic efforts lean more toward the digital realm, due in part to improvements in digital technology, along with decreases in my mobility which was an essential part of my previous photographic endeavors.

 I visit the Flickr photo sharing site several times daily.  I look at recent pictures by photographers I follow and I always spend some time looking over my own collection.  The web site has a nice feature for viewing the pictures of a photostream or album as a slideshow which can be very captivating.  I made use of that capability recently to present a slideshow of my album of photographs of my wife, Margaret, at a birthday gathering.  While it was nice to hear some favorable reactions to my photography, it was mostly rewarding that I had some success in being able to communicate to othetrs a visualization of how I perceive something. of importance in my own life.

Back to Bolaño, whatever literary value Bolaño's work may have, I think we need to be grateful to him and all the other novelists for providing some motivation to look into the possibilities of broadening our often-too-limited horizons.  

An early favorite from our Idaho days

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A few more thoughts about vocabulary and translation...

A curious. aspect in Bolaño's novel for me was his use of the term "patines" to describe a type of recreational light watercraft that are managed and rented out by one of the main characters named El Quemado.  Patines in my experience with Spanish has always meant "skates" in English. That term can be modified as patines de ruedas or patines de hielo for rollerskates and iceskates.

In my first referral of the question to Google's AI I got a translation of the term patines as being paddle boats or peddle boats.  That didn't quite fit with description of how the watercraft were being handled by El Quemado who was pictured as piling up the patines to form a kind of enclosing refuge. 

I decided to do another query of Google's AI search with a more specific description of what I wanted including pictures of the patines as the term was used in the novel.  The result was a much more likely explanation of what the term meant in the context of the novel:

1. "Beach Pedal Boats (Patines de Pedales) These are the colorful, plastic or fiberglass pedal boats equipped with built-in water slides that are a staple of Mediterranean summer rentals. In the English translation of the novel, they are directly referred to as pedal boats."

2.  "Catalan Sailing Skates (Patines a Vela)Also known simply as a patín catalán, this is a traditional lightweight sailing catamaran native to the region. Distinctively, it features two wooden hulls and a single sail but completely lacks a rudder or boom—steered entirely by the sailor shifting their body weight. "

The No.2 selection seemed the much more probable as a fit because of the greater ease of managing to haul around and stack such a craft by hand.  The use of "Catalan" in the description of the Sailing Skates was also significant because the resort of the novel was located within driving distance of the Catalan city of Barcelona.

Here are the pictures of the Catalan Sailing Skates (Patines de Vela) 

 

I could be wrong, but I'm calling it Case Closed.