Kelly At Large #124 The Dung Edition
On revision, composting, politics and Easter. Plus bonus photos.
Hello from Paris!
This week, protesters tried to burn down the Rotonde in Montparnasse with people inside. The bistro’s sin? Playing host to candidate Macron celebrating his qualification for the final round of presidential elections in 2017, though Americans will be more familiar with it as a hangout for between-the-wars artists and writers like F Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, Modigliani, Cocteau.
Demonstrations did, of course, taper off over Easter weekend so people could visit family and stuff themselves with chocolate, though I expect them to be resurrected and on the street in full force at least until April 14, when the Constitutional Council will rule if the retirement plan is legal, including the government’s decision to invoke a constitutional provision to push it through rather than put it to a final vote in the National Assembly.
In the meantime, I go about my business, which, at the moment, is revising a troublesome section about the Lesbian Avengers in my current very lesbiany book. Part of my problem is that I’ve written and talked and thought about them endlessly, but from a different point of view. And all that previous blabbifying works as a kind of wrapper, keeping me from seeing what else is inside, much less digesting it.
Which reminds me of what else I’ve been up to this week in my glamorous Parisian life—shoveling shit. Worm shit in fact. Along with my neighbors as we transferred the compost from one bin to another in our building’s backyard. All of us astounded at how quickly vegetable scraps, egg shells and banana peels turn into something which looks very much like soil.
Composting isn’t brain surgery, but there are things you have to be aware of. And if you participate in the program, the city not only gives you free bins, they assign you un maitre composteur (a master composter) — in our case an enthusiastic woman who, when she was here last was thrilled with how much we’d accumulated, before showing us how to aerate it.
This time, she waxed lyrical over the vast colony of worms that had appeared, and explained that there were a lot of beetles in one particular corner because we hadn’t mixed it up well or frequently enough and it was either too dry or too wet, I forget. But overall it was great, we’d done so well. Amazing. “Aren’t they beautiful?”
Her only tut-tuts of disapproval came when she pulled out the occasional whole sweet potato, whole radish, whole pear, both for the waste of food which could have been at least partly eaten by us humans. And because, in terms of compost, throwing out whole vegetables with their skin intact, instead of cutting them up and exposing their insides, guarantees that both the worms and microbes will be kept at bay by the peel, and the vegetable will just sit there shrinking, like a tiny mummy. Or my ideas about the Avengers.
She also pulled out “biodegradable” coffee capsules that actually aren’t compostable under ordinary circumstances. “You pretty much have to crush them into teeny-tiny pieces. Otherwise, it takes years.” Likewise, she extracted a tiny well-preserved sticker, and explained that all the fruit and vegetable stickers were supposed to biodegradable now. The problem, she said, was that, “The paper is biodegradable. But not the glue.” Ahhh. Who knew?
I was also impressed by how casual she was at the sudden appearance of jumping, leaping mice. (I stifled a scream and immediately handed over the pitchfork, so I could run away). She reached in with a gloved hand to free the baby mice who remained in a tiny nest in the back of the bin, reassuring us that we wouldn’t have unwelcome visitors once we began aerating more thoroughly.
When an older woman came downstairs with her daughter and grandkids, the mistress composter turned out to have been the one who set up the composting program at their neighborhood school as well, and she chatted with the kids about how much fun it was to crush egg shells, what worms are good for (aerating soil which is good for microbes, and also eating up the garbage and pooping it out.)
I’m glad I finally started participating. We moved in just before Covid and were immediately at odds with the neighbors about masks (so many refused to wear them) and it’s a good way to get to know them under better circumstances.
It’s also a small thing to do for the environment (I shrink at the inadequate word). Food waste apparently makes up more than 23% of non-recyclable garbage in France. It creates a ton of greenhouse gases as it decomposes. And doesn’t benefit anyone.
The Paris program which started in 2010 is part of a much bigger European plan to end food waste. And for the last couple of years the city has been running test programs to see what’s effective, putting some recycling bins in neighborhood markets and parks, in a few neighborhoods collecting it like recycling, and in others, offering bins to individual buildings like ours which have the luxury of tiny yards.
I hope at least some of it works. In 2024, recycling food waste will become an obligation across France, with the EU pushing member countries to meet new goals. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is resisted here, with the current anti-government sentiment expanding to include measures that the eco left would ordinarily embrace. But you know how it goes sometimes with babies and bathwater, noses and the infinitely spited face.
In Other News
Antisemitism on the rise in Europe—again. And again. At a recent protest in Berlin demonstrators railed not just against Israeli policy but against the existence of Israel and against Jews. Their slogan, "Death to the Jews, death to Israel!"
In Britain, a consensus is emerging that in order to protecting women-only spaces, and preserve the rights of trans people, both would be better served by clarifying the meaning of the word sex in Equality laws. Sonia Sodha writes:
my overwhelming feeling at this advent of compassionate common sense is a massive sense of relief. Relief that we may be approaching a time where we can all acknowledge a disabled woman’s right to turn down intimate care from anyone male alongside the need of a trans survivor of domestic abuse to access appropriate services, and agree both are things a humane society must accommodate.
Bonus photos from the Bois de Vincennes
That’s it for this time.
Disgruntledly yours,
xoxo K