jameswharris

Old Man vs. Front Lawn (Round 1)

by James Wallace Harris, 10/20/24

I grew up in the 1960s embracing the counterculture, so when I think of manicured lawns of suburbia I think of conformity and the song by the Monkees, “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” That song written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin contains the line, “Here in status symbol land.” That has always made me think poorly about lawncare.

Fifty-seven years after that song was popular, I’m now worrying about growing grass on my front lawn. I can’t believe it. How bourgeoisie of me. How anti-environmental. I’m not coveting a golf course lawn, just something that’s not mostly brown dirt, something that’s mostly green.

I live on a street that in one direction the homeowners have been having their lawns replaced with sod and sprinkler systems. Their lawns are uniform and beautifully green. In the other direction, the quality of lawn care falls off. So, depending which way I drive up to my house, I feel average or embarrassed. I guess the guilt of not living up to the suburban social contract is getting to me. My lawn looked awful. It was becoming dirt with vegetative patches, and what green stuff that did grow was mostly weeds.

Susan and I priced going the sod and sprinkler route, but I just won’t pay that kind of money to have a green monoculture in my front yard. However, I have thought about how to put a positive spin on this problem.

I don’t get much exercise. Partly that’s due to being lazy, and partly due to being old and broken. I got to wondering. I thought maybe working in the yard would be good exercise and it would ultimately give me more stamina and strength. I got on YouTube and started researching lawn maintenance. There’s a whole world of lawn nerds out there with plenty of advice.

I bought enough tall fescue seeds to cover the 6,000 square feet of front law and a Scotts Edge Guard Mini seed spreader. I’m not going to worry about the backyard for now, mainly because no one sees it. But it’s a jungle. I also bought a compost/dirt/peat moss spreader (a cheap Landzie knockoff) and covered the seeds with a light layer of garden soil. Then I started watering twice a day.

After a couple of weeks, I was seeing new grass in some places, but not in other places. But I was also having back problems for the first time in months. Normally, I keep my spinal stenosis under control with daily physical therapy exercises and fifteen minutes of 15-degree inversion. But that was no longer enough. I now had to resort to heating pads and pain pills.

I thought about giving up. But I kept pushing myself. I exercised, took my pills, rested on the heating pad, and then went to Home Depot and bought more bags of garden soil, another twenty pounds of Sun & Shade tall fescue seeds, and bags of decorative rocks. Ninety-two pounds in all that trip. I wore my back out, but I put in a second planting of seeds.

I rested up, stabilized my back and went back to watering twice a day. By now, the leaves had started falling, and I was afraid they would kill the new grass by shading it from the sun. I started raking the leaves off the new grass. That really bothered my back. Maybe because I was twisting in new ways.

Which brings me up to now. Yesterday I didn’t do anything and gave my back a rest. I do feel I have more stamina then when I started this project. When I started working in the yard, I could only work just ten minutes, and that wore me out. It was still hot then. I now can put up to a whole hour’s worth of work in before my back makes me go back in, but then it’s cooler. To recover, I need the heating pad and pills again until the next day.

I turn seventy-three next month. I’m wondering just how much I can push my body. I know exercise improves things, but for how long? Since we all die in the end, I have to assume that we can’t always use exercise to extend our health. I watched this video today titled: “Is Exercise a Magic Bullet for Longevity?“

It featured a graph that suggests that most people break down in their seventies. It also showed that in some societies, especially where people work hard all their lives, tend to have more folks active in their later years. But even still, for most people, the seventies are when we break down.

I don’t really care about having a beautiful lawn. I just trying to get something green to grow while testing how much I can push my body. Growing grass is like taking the GRE to see how well I might do in graduate school, but instead it tests how well I might do physically in my seventies.

But as I spend more time working on my front lawn, the more I see that needs to be done. My front yard is on a hill that drops several feet to the street. And it’s eroding. The sewer pipe is becoming exposed in one place, and roots to the big tree in the front yard are showing. I need to get several loads of dirt and sand and start building the yard back up. And the flowerbeds are full of weeds, dying azaleas, crazy holly, and vines that want to grow up the walls of the house.

Instead of fighting the Battle of the Bulge, I’m fight the Battle of the Lawn. I need to arm myself with chainsaws and weed whackers. I just don’t know if I can physically handle all of this. My friend Janis, her father is almost 100, and still works in the yard. Can I physically get into shape so I can do all the yard work I need to do? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll die trying. I can picture myself like Redd Foxx as Fred Sanford clutching my chest while standing in a pile of leaves shouting “This is the big one!” I’m not sure I want to die for lawncare, but I’m not sure I want to die watching YouTube either.

Maybe I’ll get into shape and live to be a 100 and do something else.

JWH

MY BRILLIANT FRIEND by Elena Ferrante

by James Wallace Harris, 10/19/24

Technically, My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante is the first novel in a four-volume sequence that is collectively referred to as the Neapolitan Novels. Now that I’ve read all four books, I dislike that tagline for the whole story. The four books are really one whole novel, and even though Naples, Italy is very important to the story, it doesn’t properly describe the complete novel. Each volume picks up exactly where the last one stops. If they were published in one volume with no subdivisions, you wouldn’t notice any transitions.

For this review, I’m going to refer to the whole as My Brilliant Friend, and when needed, I’ll point to the individual titles as part of the story. The structure below uses the dates for the English translation. The books were originally published in Italian one year earlier.

My Brilliant Friend (2012)
- Prologue: Eliminating All the Traces
- Childhood: The Story of Don Achille
- Adolescence: The Story of the Shoes
The Story of a New Name (2013)
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014)
- Middle Time
The Story of the Lost Child (2015)
- Maturity
- Old Age: The Story of Bad Blood
- Epilogue: Restitution

Circular Plot and Recursion

The complete story begins where it ends. And throughout this long story, it constantly refers to itself. It’s so recursive that it feels like two mirrors aimed at each other. It’s also cyclical because it’s about daughters and their mothers, who eventually become mothers of daughters. In so many ways, this story mirrors its parts.

The novel is about two women, Elena Greco and Raffaella Cerullo, who call each other Lenù and Lila. The story feels like an autobiography, and we have to remember that the author’s name is Elena too. Elena Ferrante hides behind a pseudonym, but this novel feels very autobiographical. Lenù and Lila react and respond to each other so intensely that it’s hard to tell who originates what traits. I even imagined that Elena Greco is writing about two versions of her own identity, the one who writes books, and her ordinary self. And it’s interesting that Ferrante hides behind her pseudonym, claiming she wants to remain anonymous while Lila also wants to remain anonymous throughout the story. So many reflections.

Literary Novels

I’ve always thought the greatest of literary novels feel biographical or autobiographical. They don’t need to be about real people, but they do need to feel like they are, and this novel offers two realistic portraits. Another trait of great literary novel is setting. We often think of London when we think of Dickens, or Russia when we think of Tolstoy, or Ireland when we think of Joyce. Ferrante has made her book about Naples and Italy.

If you’ve only read the first volume, My Brilliant Friend, you should tell yourself that you never finished the novel. The Neapolitan Novels boxed set runs 1,965 pages. On audio the four books run 78 hours and 52 minutes. To give perspective, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy averages about 60 hours in the various audio editions. Different translations of The Bible run 82-102 hours. The seven volumes of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past runs 154 hours and 14 minutes. In other words, the whole My Brilliant Friend is a literary heavyweight.

Most novels that come out in a series are never artistically heavier than a single volume. That’s why when I finished reading the single volume entitled My Brilliant Friend, I couldn’t understand why the writers polled by The New York Times considered it the top book of the 21st century so far. It was good, but not that good. That’s because it’s only one-fourth of a whole. Now that I’ve read all four volumes, I can easily see why it was voted the top novel of this century.

Will it Become a Classic?

Whenever I read a highly respective modern novel I’ve wondered if it will someday be considered a classic. I’ve never felt sure about any modern novel to predict one before. However, for the whole of My Brilliant Friend I felt like it was at least an equal to Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. That novel only runs 36-40 hours in audio, so it’s about half the size of the full version of My Brillian Friend. The Ferrante novel is far more ambitious, at least in being a biography of two women, so maybe it needs twice the space that Tolstoy used to tell us about Anna Karenina. However, Anna is never developed in such detail like Lenù and Lila.

We follow Lenù and Lila from being little girls to old women, and that makes a huge difference in storytelling ambition. This novel is primarily about friendship, even though it says almost as much about kinship. Men do not come across well in this story. This novel is feminist at a visceral level. I’d also say this book is an anti-chemistry book in the sexual sense. Time and time again, hormones overwhelm Lenù and Lila into making bad life-changing decisions. The great loves of their lives are the same evil Mr. Right. Nino Sarratore is no Mr. Darcy. Ferrante makes Nino one of the detestable bad guys of literary history. I can’t believe that Lenù and Lila didn’t immediately recognize that he was a clone of his father, Donato, the slimy seducer they knew from childhood.

The Prose

It’s hard to judge the writing of a translated novel. I do know that Ann Goldstein’s translation of Ferrante’s Italian prose is clear and precise, and the writing comes across as vivid and impactful, but the style is plain and unadorned. It lacks the colorful authorial voice of two recent novels where the prose enchanted me, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Nor does it have any the wonderful authorial commentary like old literary writers Dickens or Tolstoy since Ferrante’s story is told in the first person.

A lot of modern bestsellers have the highly refined writing style taught by MFA programs. Readability and clarity are valued over wordy digressions and colorations. This is one reason why I have a hard time predicting if a novel will become a classic a century from now. The classics we’ve crowned from the 19th century all have distinctive writer’s voices. Ferrante’s voice comes across through the characterizations of Lenù and Lila, and it’s confusing to distinguish Elena the author’s voice from Elena the character.

Final Judgment

I liked this story tremendously. It may have ruined me for reading lesser novels, especially for reading science fiction, which seldom achieves any kind of deep character development. The whole story of My Brilliant Friend reminds me of two other multi-novel sequences about characters as they age.

The first is A Dance to the Music of Time, a twelve-volume series by Anthony Powell which he wrote from 1951 to 1975 using his own life and friends for inspiration. I reviewed them here, here, and here.

And the other are books by Elizabeth Strout. Collectively, they follow the growth of two women too, Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. I’ve reviewed them here.

This first reading of the entire My Brilliant Friend story will not be enough to truly appreciate this novel. Even though it’s told in a straightforward manner, it is quite complex in what it has to say. I listened to the books this time. Next time I’ll read them with my eyes. Luckily, I have a one-volume Kindle edition that includes all four books.

Ferrante made me think about my life as a whole. She also makes me think about aging. And she has quite a lot to say about the relationship between men and women. Her novel might be the perfect illustration as to why we don’t have free will. Whether or not it becomes a classic in future centuries, it is worth reading and contemplating now. It gives us lot to meditate on.

JWH

Age vs. Ability

by James Wallace Harris

We’re told that scientific studies show that we peak mentally and physically early in life but is that true for all our abilities. Where does wisdom come in? If I found a magic lamp and a genie offered me three wishes I might wish for the physical agility of Simone Biles, or the stamina of Beth Potter, or I might ask for the language ability of Amor Towles, or the political and economic savvy of Robert Reich, or even wish for the historical wisdom of Yuval Noah Harari, or the scientific brilliance of Sabine Hossenfelder. Unfortunately, there are no magic lamps with wish granting genies. I must live with who I am.

If I peaked mentally and physically in my late teens or twenties, whatever my best abilities were, they weren’t memorable. What’s weird is I don’t want to be young again, not if I must give up everything I learned. And I suppose whatever I’m afraid of losing might be called wisdom. Is wisdom the defining ability of being old? I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m particularly wise, nor do I know any older folks who seem all that wise. Wisdom might be undefinable, undetectable, and only perceived by the individual, and even that perception is relative.

If we consider the current U.S. presidential election, and the five people taking part in the televised debates are 40, 59, 60, 78, and 81 years old. Disregarding their political philosophy, it was obvious they had a range of cognitive abilities. The younger ones spoke more precisely, responded better to questions, were quicker to compose thought out responses, and overall expressed themselves better.

But what about wisdom. The two oldest candidates did promote what they believed from a lifetime of experience, but would we call wisdom? All the candidates show abilities needed to be politicians, which involve long scheduled days with tremendous amount of social interaction. That is impressive. I’m 72, and I couldn’t do what either the 78- or 81-year-olds do. Just a few days of political campaigning would kill me. However, I’ve got to assume, that the younger candidates have an easier time with those long days on the campaign trail.

But back to me and you. I was reading an article in the New York Times the other day about how memory loss isn’t the only sign of onset dementia. It said having trouble doing your finances, sleeping poorly, going through personality changes, having trouble driving, and losing the ability to smell are other signs that your brain isn’t firing on all cylinders.

This made me to ask myself: Is there anything I can do better now than when I was younger? Well, maybe writing essays. Okay, I’m having trouble thinking of other things. I feel I’m a better reader. And since I started playing the games on the New York Times games app every day I’ve gotten better at Wordle, Connections, Mini Crossword and Sudoku. I should admit I might have reached a plateau with all of those games.

My guess is over weeks and months I figured out how to apply all my existing abilities with those games and reached a certain level of proficiency. That felt like I was improving, which is a good feeling when you’re 72. However, I noticed that although I can finish every Sudoku game in a matter of minutes on the easy level, I have never been able to finish any game at the medium level.

When I discovered that, I’ve switched from playing the easy mode every day to the medium mode. I eventually sensed that my innate abilities let me discover several methods of solving the easy level Sudoku puzzles, but I never had the abilities that involve the more complex methods of solving the medium level puzzles. The challenge I gave myself was to studying Sudoku tutorials and learn those methods. I’ve tried for the past week, but so far, I’ve failed. I sense there are methods I could apply, and I almost grasp a couple of them when studying the tutorials, but when I try to apply in a daily game, I forget what they were.

So far, I don’t think I’m having problems with the five non-memory issues the New York Times identified that were early signs of dementia. But would I recognize a decline in those areas if I did?

I avoid driving at night or on freeways. I can do it, but it causes anxiety. One thing I do now that I’m older is avoid anxiety. So, should I check that box? I do fine with my finances, but I just do what’s required, I don’t try to improve my situation. I have weird sleeping habits because of problems with frequent peeing, but I feel like I’ve adapted and don’t feel sleep deprived. I think I still smell things simply fine. I can smell the cat shit several rooms away when a cat poops in their box. Does that give me a passing score? And I think I’ve gone through some personality changes, but I assume they were due to adapting to being retired.

I feel I’m pushing myself harder and I’m more disciplined than when I was younger. However, I know I can’t do what I used to do and have little stamina.

Overall, I’d say I have far less abilities than when I was younger, but I feel better adapted to being old than I did at being young. I still feel like I’m honing the abilities I care about, even though I’ve giving up on everything else.

Is getting old just streamlining our abilities to do more with less?

JWH

Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout

by James Wallace Harris, 9/24/24

I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Strout. I just finished her new book that came out just a couple of weeks ago, Tell Me Everything. It was wonderful. Now I could just say to you, “Go out and read it,” but that’s problematic. This is Elizabeth Strout’s tenth book, and it includes characters that have been in eight of her other novels.

Tell Me Everything is mostly about Bob Burgess, and it includes his brother Jim. They were featured in The Burgess Boys (2013). Bob was also in Lucy by the Sea (2022). Lucy Barton’s first book is My Name is Lucy Barton (2016), and her story continued in Anything is Possible (2017), Oh William! (2021) and Lucy by the Sea, and she’s one of the main characters in Tell Me Everything. Elizabeth Strout’s most famous character is Olive Kitteridge who first appeared in Olive Kitteridge (2008), and her story continued in Olive, Again (2019), but she’s also a minor character in Lucy by the Sea and Tell Me Everything.

One of the exciting things about reading Tell Me Everything is Lucy and Olive meet and become friends. Olive is 90 when the story starts and 91 at the end, but we’ve known her since she was in her fifties, working as a teacher. She’s now in assistant living facility. We’ve followed Lucy for most of her life, and she’s now in her mid-sixities in Tell Me Everything.

I believe the title of the new novel comes from Lucy’s and Olive’s relationship where they tell each other stories about people who have unrecorded lives. But also, because Strout tells her novels by having characters tell their stories to each other. (I must wonder if Strout makes up all these stories, or are they based on stories from people she has known?)

Tell Me Everything is a fine novel to read without having read all the other novels, but you won’t get the full Elizabeth Strout impact unless you’ve read her novels in order. Tell Me Everything reiterates many of the major details of the previous novels but I’m not sure the characters will have the same impact. Bob, Lucy, and Olive in the new book are like the tips of icebergs, very impressive, but you don’t get to see them below the waterline.

The two Olive Kitteridge books are collections of thirteen short stories each, twenty-six stories in all. Sometimes Olive is the point-of-view character, and sometimes she just makes a cameo in other people’s stories. She’s not a featured character in Lucy by the Sea or Tell Me Everything. And she’s a lot more than the character people get from wonderful Frances McDormand’s portrayal of her in the HBO miniseries. Olive is immensely multidimensional. But to understand her requires experiencing all those layers. Many people, the other characters in the novels, and readers who read Strout’s books, hate Olive because she’s so abrasive. I love Olive.

We met Lucy in My Name is Lucy Barton which is a fictional memoir told in first person. It sounds like a monologue by Lucy in audiobook. But in Anything is Possible, we hear about Lucy’s childhood through a series of stories told by people who knew Lucy growing up. Oh William! returns to the fictional memoir style, with Lucy telling her story like a long monologue again. That style continues in Lucy by the Sea. In Tell Me Everything, Strout returns to third person, and Lucy is being observed again, especially by Bob Burgess.

Strout is not an omniscient narrator. We learn about characters from the opinions of other characters, and the opinions we form. It would be interesting if Strout wrote a book about her characters using the 19th century style god view of characters.

Lucy is also a complex character who is an observer of other people. And although Olive observes other people, she isn’t as insightful as Lucy. In Tell Me Everything, Lucy teaches Olive about learning and telling other people’s stories, and we see Olive become a much better observer. Lucy is also very philosophical, but not in a deep intellectual sense. Lucy works to make sense of reality through understanding the emotional experiences of others. Bob often thinks Lucy is naive and childlike, but is she?

We got to know Bob in The Burgess Boys, a third person novel. However, this approach doesn’t move far away from Strout’s basic writing technique of writing novels by collecting anecdotes about other people.

Most novels are about something big. Something dramatic. Strout’s books are about ordinary people who have suffered or are suffering ordinary kinds of experiences and emotions that we all suffer. Most of her characters had troubled childhoods. Some of her characters like Lucy, were quite poor growing up. But other characters are well-to-do or become successful. This makes Strout’s novels feel they are about class. Some reviewers make a lot out of the class angle, but I don’t.

Tell Me Everything is about unrequited love, death, murder, child abuse, jealousy, marriage, infidelity, friendships, aging, careers, art, counseling, fashion, resentment, feelings, emotions, alcoholism, understanding the past, reading other people, nude pregnant women, and much more. As Bob Burgess says, of Lucy’s stories about other people, they are about life.

I know some readers don’t like Strout because her books are about ordinary aspects of life. They don’t involve exciting page turning plots. I find them quite thrilling because they make me think about people and myself.

I’m about to start the third of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante, which began with the international bestseller, My Brilliant Friend. They are also about ordinary people involving a lot of characters. I find both series appealing because of what might be considered a sexist take on them. I feel they give me women’s insight into reading emotions. Me, and my guy friends don’t read emotions like the women characters in these novels. I don’t know if this ability is a common trait of all women, or just women writers. But it’s why I like both writers.

JWH

What New Subjects and Tasks Am I Capable of Learning at Age 73 in 2025?

by James Wallace Harris, 9/16/24

I know I’m an old dog in a long slow mental and physical decline due to aging, but I wonder if I can still learn new tricks. I’m already having trouble recalling names and nouns, but if I work at it, I eventually fish those missing words out the darkness of my unconscious mind. I pursue the same daily activities I’ve always pursued, but I wonder if could learn to do something new. Maybe if I work hard at digging a new rut it would become a new daily activity.

My friend Mary Ann mentioned she must memorize the details for two hundred works of art for her M.A. in art history. I asked her for that list, and I’m trying to learn it too. I’m gathering digital images of all the works and putting their details into a spreadsheet. I’m trying to figure out how to systematically study the content and then test myself. I hope this might be an effective way of calculating how much I can still learn and retain.

I’ve been trying to use Linux as my regular computer system. I discovered Linux back in the early 1990s on Usenet News. Every so often I install it and see if I can do all my computer work on it. It’s always failed me. This past year I realized that Linux has gotten so good as a desktop replacement that I might be able to finally switch. However, yesterday I hit another wall and gave up. I realized that if I got deep into the way Linux worked at the command line level, I could probably solve my latest problems. I’m having trouble getting my scanner to work, but also, when I tried to move my Plex server from Windows to Jellyfin on Linux I hit a snag that annoyed me so much I packed away my Linux box.

A year ago, I tried to set up Plex on Linux, but Plex never could see my media files. That was probably a permission problem. I then tried Plex on Windows, and I was watching TV shows on my Roku streamer in about ten minutes. I can get things done on Windows in a snap, but it’s always hours of aggravation using Linux. I wondered if it’s a cognitive learning barrier, or laziness, or impatience? I just don’t have what it takes anymore. I decided not to waste time butting my head against a wall.

But that experience made me question myself: Am I capable of learning something new? I keep trying and I keep failing. Should I just accept that? Am I not trying hard enough? One thing about getting older is having less energy. It makes me throw in the towel quicker. That makes me wonder if the problem is being able to stick with something or is it an actual mental barrier that I can’t cross. I don’t know.

Right now, I’m still positive. I like to think if I stuck with a task, no matter how slowly, or for however many days it might take, I could eventually get the job done. Sure, it might take weeks longer because I might only be able to work at my goal twenty-minutes at day instead of hours a day. Or am I kidding myself?

Do we quit learning as we get older because we don’t have the brain cells, or the patience, or the energy, or the focus? (Or combination of all of them.) It’s getting hard to even write these essays. I run out of steam so quickly. Applying my brain at almost anything now makes me want to go take a nap. The trouble is coming back. Sometimes I can pick up where I left off and sometimes I can’t. My drafts folder currently has 152 unfinished attempts since I last deleted it.

The thing about getting old is we know it ends badly. We must triage our desires, and jettison more wants. I still have a lengthy list of things I want to do or learn, but I’m having to cross many of them off my list because I know I can no longer do them.

I keep thinking if I exercise more, eat better, sleep wisely, that I might squeeze a few more ergs of psychic energy into a project. Every day I get up and do the Wordle, The Mini, Connections, and the Sudoku in the New York Times game app on my iPhone. I’m thinking about adding Strands and The Spelling Bee. I have gotten better at all of these games. That encourages me. But they are little efforts. Playing these games is one way I test my mind each morning, like taking my blood pressure.

I need a bigger challenge to track and measure the remaining potential of my brain. I’ve thought about taking the GRE test and then study its subjects and taking the test again every few years to see what happens. But time might have run out on that plan.

I used to think of studying Python or C++ to see how far I get, but that might be too ambitious too. Studying Art History might be possible. I wish I could get into chess. Whenever I try, I immediately hit a wall. I figure it’s a matter of focus. I keep thinking I should try to increase the amount of time studying a chess move so eventually I could play a whole game. I’ve never been able to think about a move for longer than a minute before I get completely bored. I’ve wondered if I could increase that concentration up to two or three minutes if that would help me finish a game, and that skill would crossover in other things I want to do?

I watch YouTube videos by physical therapists, and they always talk about starting slow and doing a little bit more each day. That’s very inspirational. The trouble is even starting slow anymore.

But I haven’t given up.

This reminds me of an old Vaughn Bodē underground comic. It featured a little lizard-like creature. In my memory it showed the creature tied to a post, with its eyes poked out, its arms and legs cut off, whispering to a fellow prisoner, “I’ze gonna escape when it gets dark.” Am I that little creature? (I wish I had a copy of that cartoon strip. If you have it please send me a copy.)

JWH