Kelly At Large (formerly ADAB) #120 The Garbage Edition
Why the strike in Paris stinks. Plus lesbians make a comeback, gardening pays off, and women in Iran dance for freedom.
Hello from Paris where the endless strikes over retirement reform translate into endless piles of garbage. On windy days, I’ve seen it take flight, so I’ve started to wear protective glasses outside, though maybe a helmet would be better, plus armor around my neck just in case a street sign flies off and aims at that fragile stalk.
It could be worse. It could be August when overflowing bins would ferment at three times the current odiferous rate attracting even more cockroaches and mice and rats. Before the strike, Paris’s rat population was number four in the world, apparently only behind Deshnoke in India, London, and New York. Once all the free food boosts the rat population here, I bet we’ll move up.
I was taking a picture of a particularly large mound the other day when a lady stopped to commiserate.
“I’m sick of it. They always let garbage pile up in the 20th.”
I said something about the strike, but she just scowled at me.
“The city doesn’t care at all about this neighborhood,” she scoffed. “Imagine a pile of garbage like this in the Marais, or in front of the mayor’s office at the Hotel de Ville.”
She wasn’t wrong. Our residential, working class neighborhood definitely doesn’t get the same level of city services as charming touristy areas, or the places where you can almost smell the money being made. There is often garbage scattered in the street. Some acquaintances have watched drug deals from their windows, and loud drunken brawls, but report that when they call the cops and demand they do something, they can almost hear them shrug in indifference.
In this case though, you can also blame the difference on who collects what and where. Some arrondissements, the smart ones, apparently, now rely on private collection. Only the 2nd, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 17th and 20th arrondissements rely exclusively (or nearly) on city service. Even other neighborhoods, though, are affected this time, because there are strikes at the incinerators, too. And why pick up garbage if you can’t do anything with it?
On Twitter, Parisians amuse themselves by speculating about what garbagey, dilapidated condition the “City of Light” will be in when the place is flooded with visitors for the Olympic games in 2024.
Especially since the Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo, who, having denounced a similar strike in 2016 when she was already in office, is burnishing her radical credentials by supporting this one, and seems to be making no effort to hire private companies to manage the worst of the garbage.
Gee, thanks.
Piled up garbage isn’t really a joke. If you’re not decapitated by flying junk, bitten by rats, infected with something by the insects they carry, you have to worry about environmental contamination as garbage ends up in water, or blocks drains resulting in increased flooding—already a huge problem in Paris— which besides doing damage to infrastructure creates lots of standing water, another favorite place for insects like mosquitoes to breed.
On the bright side, though, in order to decrease my household’s own contribution to the mess, I’ve finally started to separate out food waste when I cook, and instead of throwing it in the trash, I trudge downstairs and add it to the composting bin in our back yard. It’s the least I can do.
In Other News
Last Sunday’s Gardening Pays Off
I have baby arugula sprouts, and also teeny-weeny leggy tomatoes.
Lesbians Make a Comeback
A new international Lesbian Project has been founded in the UK, dedicated to exploring our issues, and defending—yet again—our mere right to exist.
Here’s a piece by co-founder Kathleen Stock, “I came out late – only to find that lesbians had slipped to the back of the queue,” explaining how little is known about lesbian lives.
In social scientific research, for instance, information about lesbians is rarely disaggregated from wider groupings. Lesbians as research subjects are often lumped in with gay men, with bisexual women or with trans women. Sometimes, biological sex is not disaggregated at all in research studies, so that female respondents aren’t differentiated from male ones. At other times, they are, but lesbians and bisexual women are treated as a single category, including bisexual women in exclusive relationships with men.
Here’s Julie Bindel, the other co-founder.
Butches Are Apparently Back
Or so claims, “Tell me about it, stud: the rapturous return of the butch lesbian scene.”
“There is an absolute resurgence in butch identity, in the sense of belonging and in history as well,” says Joelle Taylor, who in 2021 won the TS Eliot Prize for a poetry collection about butch lesbian subculture.
Oldie But Goodie In this Women’s History Month
In which Germaine Greer Explains that Gender Is not Sex
Last But Not Least
In solidarity with the women who risked their freedom and their lives by daring to dance, on International Women’s Day, even more Iranian women are dancing for Freedom.
And these students denounce the poisoning of their peers. “Down with the dictatorship” and “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
That’s it for this time.
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Disgruntledly yours,
xoxo K