My second cousin Hedwig is visiting San Jose from North Germany this month, so I took her along to San Francisco for my reading at the Booksmith. In the afternoon we went to the De Young Museum, to the Conservatory of Flowers (that greenhouse in Golden Gate park), and to Haight Street. Lots of orchids in the Conservatory.

Also some great pitcher plants. These and the orchids look almost like they can talk. Like the flowers in Alice in Wonderland.

Hedwig is the daughter of a lady named Svanburga von Alten, this Svan (for short) being the daughter of Aggie von Klenck and Franz von Alten, Aggie being the sister of my grandmother Louise von Klenck, both of them being daughters of Franz von Klenck and Alice Rahe. I am up to date on all this from talking to Hedwig and from, day before yesterday, spending a few hours scanning in a 5 Meg zoomable PDF version of a family tree that my uncle Rudolf von Bitter (my mother's brother) made of his ancestors before going off to die on the Russian front in WWII. Touching to think of all those generations, all those intense lives. By the way, you can find the great philosopher Hegel in this particular tree, like I’m always bragging about.

On Haight Street I took my respectable German cousin into one of the Haight Street shops selling cheap flashy party clothes: giant fake-fur hats, sequin miniskirts, clip-on feather scrunchies, skintight polyester tiger pants, like that. Well, maybe I followed her in, rather than taking her in. Being a tourist, she wasn’t embarrassed. The women working there were these somewhat skanky but very lively (possibly stoned) hippie types. And it struck me that exactly the same types were working there twenty, forty years ago. Even if you were born in 1986, you can still be an exact and archetypal Haight Street hippie. The persistance of social roles.

My reading went well; a good crowd showed up. (This pic isn’t actually of the audience, it’s a shelf in my favorite Haight Street store, Kid Robot.)

[Prehistoric tree fern in G. G. Park.]

Apropos of the themes of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul,, there’s an interesting list of nanotech and computation-theoretical questions on the head page for Stephen Wolfram’s NKS 2006 Science Conference this summer.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 8th, 2006 at 11:05 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.