Yesterday, biking home from the gym and library, I noticed a cloud or two, small, white and fluffy, on the horizon, but mostly the sky was sky blue. And I thought how nice it would be--for a few months--to be in Paris, which we will on Wednesday, and to look out our kitchen window every morning and see a grand show of clouds, changing, like the ocean changes, and silver-grey as if the zinc roofs of the buildings around us ran off into the sky.
Well, what do you know? Two days after my post on the robots collecting the trash in my neighbourhood, the New York Times has a story about robotic arms moving stuff around Amazon (startling how"Amazon" no longer has, at first encounter, anything to do with the continent of South America: there was a story about lost tribes in the Amazon today, and it took me a few head-scratching seconds to realize that it wasn't that Amazon), and how this is just so much better for the warehouse workers, for example "Linda" who until recently was exhausting herself loading and carrying and stacking plastic bins filled with merchandise, and how she now spends her day outside a fenced cage in which robots do the same work, managing the robots--a job which, however, should also, no doubt soon, disappear. "Linda" says her new job is much more varied and intellectually stimulating. So you see, mechanization is not the end of work / workers after all.
I feel a lot better about the future of work.
Meanwhile the roof overhead is crawling with workers installing insulation on our 16-unit building, who every so often break into song, so I'm off to the gym and library until relative silence returns.
I just noticed that the trash collectors, the two men, who go behind the truck, pick up the bins and put them on the back of the truck to be dumped, remove the bins and set them back on the street, have been replaced--in our neighbourhood--by a school-bus yellow robot with two arms that hug the bin, lift and dump it, set it carefully back in the street, and the truck (self-driven?) moves on.
(Here's a YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxJzDubWJMQube)
'That's neat,' I thought.
But what happened to the two men, the two (ok, back-breaking) jobs?
Do they get jobs in fastfood? At the Ikeas?
In Paris we live right above and down the street from the place the garbage collectors congregate with their trucks. Sure, trash collector may not be a great job description, but there seems to be a lot of social activity, an esprit-de-corps among them (mostly Africans, or Franco-Africans), a lot of jostling and joking, a lot of male, sorry, bonding. Somehow I don't imagine this being quite the same at MacDonald's, but maybe I'm just nostalgic.
We're having a heat wave: temperatures at 105 degrees fahrenheit (40 celsius) for the past three days. When you walk out into it, you hit a wall of heat that feels like it should any minute spontaneously combust. "Spontaneous combustion" is term I learned in primary school from the Fire Department, which used to make a yearly visit to the classroom to warn another 30 budding householders about the dangers of running electric cords under rugs and storing oily paint rags. In other, less democratic (?) parts of the world children have been encouraged to turn their parents in for impolitic opinions; but where I grew up we were encouraged to report their dangerously incivil attention to the trajectories of electric lamp cords and leftover paint rags.
Last evening at about 6 pm, two hours before sunset, having been stuck inside all day, I betook myself to the university vegetable and flower farm to do a spot of weeding. In no time sweat was rolling down my cheeks, fogging my sunglasses. And it didn't let up. However, like the good calvinist I am, I persisted. I weeded all of "A Block" (tomatoes, bachelor buttons, various sizes, colours and hotness of peppers, parsley. . .) before I put my tools and bucket back, changed from sneakers to flipflops (feet dust-coloured), snipped some basil for dinner, a few tomatoes and 4 or 5 sunflowers, and headed home, where my husband was about to depart, by bike, on a search-and-rescue mission.
I went to the dentist the other day to get a couple of teeth filled, one "the smallest we've done all year," the other, well, a filling.
I was early. I'm always early; otherwise I am stressed. I'm always the one waiting at the front door to leave, fuming because my husband, after he says, "Let's go," always finds three more things to do, plus putting on his shoes. OK, so this is a much healthier attitude to time, but can I help how I am? Two of my kids are like me with respect to time, one is like him. So...
I was sitting looking through the stack of magazines and eavesdropping on a conversation between the dentist's helper and a new receptionist-accountant, which went like this:
"How come there are so many unpaid accounts? This is really a lot of outstanding bills. People are supposed to pay on the way out. The insurance will reimburse them directly." (She is upset; it is her responsibility to break in the new receptionist. There has been a big turnover in receptionist-accountants since the old--but not old in that sense--dentist died very suddenly nine months ago.)
New accountant-receptionist: "This man was in a hurry when he left. He told me to send him a bill..."
Dentist's helper, nice, but clearly unhappy: "When they go to the supermarket, do they tell the cashier, 'I'm in a hurry, send me a bill?"
I paid for my fillings on the way out.
Yesterday I took my courage (and my credit card) in my hands and set out to reserve tickets to Paris in September. I have some conspiracy theories: 1) it's better to book at the beginning of the week; 2) as soon as you begin searching prices, they go up, as if the computer knew that you--you personally--were looking to buy a ticket, the way they target you with furniture ads, because they know you like furniture, or porn. Better take the cheapest price of the day, because tomorrow, should you 'think it over' (as my mother used to say when she was shopping for clothes), they'll know you are trapped and the price will be higher. "Only two seats left!' Air France warns in red letters, but when I jump on it and try to select a seat, it turns out there are no seats left. Presumably I am overbooked...
I hope our apartment building roof will be done before we go. They began mid-June when I was last in Paris. For two weeks no workers have turned up, and meanwhile it has looked like rain a few times. "We can't afford to cover rain damage" for the top floor apartments, another resident warns the project manager. The roofer promises a big team as soon as the inspector comes. Today there are a couple of workers up there; I hear some desultory--perhaps I'm unfair?--hammering. Every now and then we send up an ollalieberry pie as a bribe.
Today the air is blue, the chute that runs past our window to the dumpster is orange, which is fortunate, because orange is my sitting room accent colour. We watched the eclipse yesterday from the building roof and found it (not total) underwhelming. UPS has just pulled up, part of the daily ballet of deliveries. Now I'm going to return a couple books to the university library: a Philip Kerr mystery I didn't dislike, but didn't love either--too wisecracking; and a fascinating book called Retour a Reims, by Didier Eribon, a combination of sociology and personal history.
I'm not, as a rule, a big fan of Elizabeth Bowen. But I have a friend whose opinion I respect who often talks about her, so that is one reason I persist in reading her novels: a few months ago, The Heat of the Day, a WW2 novel set in London, whose dialogues struck me, as Bowen's often do, as stilted and theatrical--unless they are utterly natural and simply out of my range.
But I've just finished The House in Paris, one I've been looking for for a while, which never seemed to be on the Bowen shelf in the library, and which I finally sought via its call number, and discovered, with tea-coloured pages, in a musty-smelling back section of the low-ceilinged, over-heated old stacks. I wanted to read it because of: 1) Paris; 2) the house. Houses are important for Bowen and often themselves as important as the characters in her books. I like houses too. This one seems to be close to the Luxembourg Garden, a high, narrow, dark old house, forbidding and foreboding. The story revolves around two children, strangers, and some mysterious grown-ups whose relationships are gradually elucidated. I have read that it was considered the most French, in style, of Bowen's books, though it doesn't seem particularly French to me, if I think of Colette and Duras and Sarraute and Beauvoir...
But it is psychologically subtle and finely written, or at least I found it so, and recommend it.
I turned down a page (many were dog-eared) so I could find a sentence again. It is from a scene between a mother and daughter. Of the over-devoted, controlling mother, the daughter, who is engaged to be married but has just returned from a rendez-vous with another manthinks: 'Dread of chaos filled the room... ." And I thought, ah yes, the impulse to control comes from the dread of chaos.
Charles Boyle, aka "Robinson" of Robinson and The Overcoat (see below), says in a blog post: "Careers and livelihoods depend upon just the right degree of non-seriousness. It’s a British code."
Well yes. But it's also a French code. Go to a dinner party and wax serious and pretty soon people are looking at you funny, as if you'd forgotten the rules of conversation. Oops, time to talk to the person on the other side.
In the US on the other hand, irony doesn't always go down well. Better to know the company you are in before you ironise and your neighbours take it at face value.
Canada is somewhere in between... .