Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen, 1811

We read this for the Great Books group – moved up a few months because public domain books are easiest while Forbes is closed. Unlike many, I didn’t get into Austen until I was at least in my 30s, and this may only be the third or so time I’ve read it. Immediately after finishing it I had to go re-watch the Emma Thompson movie, which is one of the few screenplays I think really improves on the original book (the other one that leaps to mind is To Kill a Mockingbird).

I keep forgetting this was her first novel – no wonder it’s not the best! It’s amusing, but the pacing is a little choppy. I think early Austen is more prone to the tendency, showcased here, for the protagonists to be essentially perfect (with some room for improvement, but basically born good, full of virtue and refined taste) and everyone else to be on a spectrum between foolish and bad. We’re told of Elinor at the very beginning that “her feelings were strong; but she knew how to govern them: it was a knowledge which her mother had yet to learn.” Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne are both silly, and though Elinor’s sense will learn to share her feelings a little more, Marianne’s sensibility (sensitiveness verging on romantic sentimentality) will need to change dramatically.

Mrs. Dashwood and Marianne enjoy being miserable: “The agony of grief which overpowered them at first, was voluntarily renewed, was sought for, was created again and again.” Marianne “was without any power, because she was without any desire of command over herself.” They are foolishly optimistic: “with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.” Mrs. Dashwood plans improvements to the cottage “from the savings of an income of five hundred a year by a woman who never saved in her life.” When she rewrites history about Colonel Brandon, “Elinor perceived … the natural embellishments of her mother’s active fancy, which fashioned every thing delightful to her as it chose;” and then

“There was always a something,—if you remember,—in Willoughby’s eyes at times, which I did not like.”

Elinor could not remember it

Marianne, with excellent abilities and an excellent disposition, was neither reasonable nor candid. She expected from other people the same opinions and feelings as her own, and she judged of their motives by the immediate effect of their actions on herself.

Of course we get delightful observations of the silliest people:

Sir John was loud in his admiration at the end of every song, and as loud in his conversation with the others while every song lasted. Lady Middleton frequently called him to order, wondered how any one’s attention could be diverted from music for a moment, and asked Marianne to sing a particular song which Marianne had just finished.

Having to spend so much time with such annoying people – and because Marianne won’t bother to be polite, Elinor bears the brunt of the social niceties – makes the socializing feel vividly oppressive. Marianne quips: “The rent of this cottage is said to be low; but we have it on very hard terms, if we are to dine at the park whenever any one is staying either with them, or with us.”

Marriage usually seems fairly tedious if not unhappy; no wonder that in Austen’s narratives we get to the altar and stop there! But marriage is the be-all and end-all. The women walk a knife-edge between “virtue” and complete disaster (Moll Flanders was such a bracing alternative!) – Willoughby can say flatly that even though his aunt would have forgiven him if he married Eliza, “That could not be.”

A few more delightfully snarky yet realistic passages:

The whole of Lucy’s behaviour in the affair, and the prosperity which crowned it, therefore, may be held forth as a most encouraging instance of what an earnest, an unceasing attention to self-interest, however its progress may be apparently obstructed, will do in securing every advantage of fortune, with no other sacrifice than that of time and conscience.

But that [Willoughby] was for ever inconsolable, that he fled from society, or contracted an habitual gloom of temper, or died of a broken heart, must not be depended on—for he did neither. He lived to exert, and frequently to enjoy himself. His wife was not always out of humour, nor his home always uncomfortable; and in his breed of horses and dogs, and in sporting of every kind, he found no inconsiderable degree of domestic felicity.

We talked about Austen’s eternal appeal for adaptation: partly the human love of gossip; partly how cuttingly funny she is; partly how tidy and neat the narrative is, with a small cast of characters, a few locations, and happy endings tied up in bows; partly the conflict between a particularly repressed/restrained milieu and the full range of human nature (since it’s the Regency, Austen’s characters don’t yet pretend to ignore sex and death, unlike typical Victorians).

Somewhere I have the Emma Thompson book of the screenplay and her shooting diaries, which I’ll re-read when I find it. The screenplay’s pacing, the character development (especially little sister Margaret, who’s a cipher here but in the movie gives both Edward and Brandon opportunities to show their caring and goodness), the brilliant mix of textual dialogue and new lines, the wise character pruning (I don’t miss Lady Middleton, but Anne Steele has some good bits) – it’s an amazing adaptation. And then the movie piles on top-notch casting (the big names of course, but also Hugh Laurie as Mr. Palmer! Harriet Walter as Fanny!), superb acting, and Ang Lee as director. I’m finishing this post about two weeks after the discussion, and I’m ready to watch it again.

Shorter quotes:

  • “a fond mother, though, in pursuit of praise for her children, the most rapacious of human beings, is likewise the most credulous; her demands are exorbitant; but she will swallow any thing”
  • Willoughby “hardly ever falls in love with anybody”
  • “Mrs. Jennings’s endeavours to cure a disappointment in love, by a variety of sweetmeats and olives, and a good fire”
  • Mrs. Ferrars “was not a woman of many words; for, unlike people in general, she proportioned them to the number of her ideas.”
  • “no poverty of any kind, except of conversation”
  • Poor Elinor has “to be the comforter of others in her own distresses, no less than in theirs”
  • John Dashwood “never wished to offend anybody, especially anybody of good fortune”
  • “Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate … to overcome an affection formed so late in life as at seventeen.”

In this book I learned:

Reading Project Gutenberg books on various devices

During the pandemic, the two Forbes Library book groups that I coordinate (Great Books, and Nature and Environment) are reading books in the public domain so that we can get them online without waiting lists. I wanted to compile some directions to send to group members but haven’t found a good one-stop resource, so I’m attempting one here. Please add a comment if you have better resources or if any of this is incorrect.

I will send out links to the main download location for the book, which is in pattern gutenberg.org/ebooks/[book number]. Here we use Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2084. Note that if you do an Internet search for a title, the result you’ll often get will be the link directly to the HTML version (“Read this book online”): https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2084/2084-h/2084-h.htm. That’s great for reading in a web browser, but if you have an e-reader or tablet you can download a file that you can read more easily.

Click the link to download the EPUB file for Android (Google Play Books) or Mac (iBooks or Apple Books). Use the Kindle link for Kindle. You can choose the Box, Google Drive, or OneDrive icons to download directly into those cloud services rather than onto your hard drive.

  • On an Android phone or tablet, or on a Chromebook, use the Google Play Books app. The simplest way is to visit https://play.google.com/books on a computer first and click Upload Files. You can upload from the local computer or from Google Drive. After you select the file (epub in this case, but you can also upload PDFs), it will take a minute to process. Once complete, the book is in your Play Books library under Uploads and can be accessed from any device which has the Play Books app installed.
  • On a Mac or iPad, use the iBooks or Apple Books app. Click File/Add to Library and browse to the file you downloaded (epub in this case, but you can also upload PDFs). [I don’t have an iPad to test on; you should be able to import there as well or visit the mobile version of Project Gutenberg, https://m.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2084.mobile]
  • For Kindle, plug the device into your computer and drag-and-drop the downloaded .mobi file into the Documents file on your Kindle. Or you can send it to your Kindle via email.

The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness – Sy Montgomery, 2015

Very enjoyable but far from perfect. One of the Nature and Environment book group folks said she’d made the mistake of listening to the audiobook and did a very funny impression of the author (who reads it herself) being dramatic about everything: “And THEN I picked up my GLASSES and they were AMAZING!” Also, we were shocked by the poor captive octopuses who live in a pickle barrel, which Montgomery touches on but doesn’t fully engage with.

The bottom right corner of each page makes a little flip-book of an octopus moving, which is cool.

I’ve always loved octopuses but learned a lot that was new to me:

  • they taste people’s skin with their suckers
  • the females have estrogen (and in fact, lots of hormones are cross-species, like oxytocin—I had no idea!)
  • Tennyson’s “The Kraken” is about an octopus (did I ever read it? and me such a Tennyson fan!)
  • octopuses can change the texture of their skin as well as its color
  • a hagfish can “fill seven buckets with slime” in minutes (which led me to learn much more about the amazing genus Myxini–that name! the only animal with a skull but no vertebral column; they can tie themselves into a knot for leverage or slime exudation! they can eat with their skin!!!)

An octopus presented with a difficult puzzle for the first time often undergoes several rapid changes in color, like a person who frowns, bites his lip, and furrows his brow when trying to solve a problem. A nervous octopus takes special care to disguise its head and especially its eyes, and can create a variety of spots, bars, and squiggles to confuse a predator. … Another disguise is known as the eyebar display, in which an octopus makes a thick, dark line extend at the outer edge of the eye from either end of each slit pupil, masking the roundness that is typical of an eye.

I strongly identified with this quote: “A bite from a fish or an octopus is proof we are willing, even eager, to literally give ourselves (even tiny, actual pieces) to the animals here [at the aquarium], in order to touch the wild” because it reminded me of feeding stingrays on a trip to the Florida Keys. It was an amazing experience—the rays swarmed me as I sat in the shallows with their food, like muscle pancakes shouldering each other aside—but the trainer warned me to keep my hand flat with the food because “they’ll accidentally bite you, and it feels like getting your finger slammed in a door” (because the ray’s teeth are like flat cement plates smashing together). I did get bitten and that’s exactly what it felt like. I wouldn’t have tried to make it happen on purpose, but I’m glad it did because it was so alien and cool.

  • “an area pocked with nooks and crannies into which an octopus could melt as easily as butter into an English muffin”
  • diving is “like being an invisible time-traveler to another planet”
  • “The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible.”

Above the surface, we move and think like wiggly children, or like teens who twitch away at their computer-phones, multitasking but never focusing. But the ocean forces you to move more slowly, more purposefully, and yet more pliantly. By entering it, you are bathed in a grace and power you don’t experience in air. To dive beneath the surface feels like entering the Earth’s vast, dreaming subconscious. Submitting to its depth, its currents, its pressure, is both humbling and freeing.

Narada the ascetic and Vishnu:

When Vishnu became thirsty, he asked Narada to fetch him some water. Narada went to a house and there met a woman so beautiful he forgot what he came for. He married the woman; together they farmed the land, raised cattle, and had three children. Then came a violent monsoon. Floods threatened to carry away the village’s houses, the cattle, the people. Narada took his wife by the hand, his children by the other. But the waters were too strong and they were lost. Narada was swept beneath the waves. Washed up on shore, he opened his eyes… to see there, still waiting for his drink of water, Vishnu—the got who is often picture as sleeping on a fathomless ocean as his dreams bubble forth to create the universe.

April 2020 books read

  • “The Moon Moth” – Jack Vance, 1961. Just a short story, but such a favorite that I’m listing it. It successfully combines Vance’s mystery genre side (he wrote a bunch as John Holbrook Vance as well as some “Ellery Queen” novels) with his primary skill at anthropological science fiction, culminating in a delightfully-satisfying twist ending.
  • Water in Plain Sight: Hope for a Thirsty World – Judith D. Schwartz, 2016 – quotes pulled, tbd
  • Angle of Repose – Wallace Stegner, 1971 – quotes pulled, TBD
  • Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (tr. Constance Garnett), 1878 (1901) – ditto!
  • The House that Berry Built – Dornford Yates, 1945. My father, who sparked my love of Yates through this book specifically, died this month, and I picked this up to re-read for the umpteenth time in memory of him…
  • An Eye for a Tooth – Dornford Yates, 1943. …and then I was off on a Yates kick, but a restrained one. This time I just went back to a few of the thrillers – this is one that I acquired late and so didn’t remember that well. I might only have read it once or twice, imagine that! Not bad but a little past his prime in this genre.
  • Safe Custody – Dornford Yates, 1932. I moved on to the series that deal with one of my favorite McGuffins ever, a set of 127 carved jewels commissioned by Pope Alexander VI. They’re so well-described that I wish they really existed; I see that they were probably inspired by the Pope Paul II collection of 827 such gems.

March 2020 books read

  • Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel, 2014. I love post-apocalyptic fiction, and the coronavirus pandemic was just picking up in the US when I finished this. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it was overshadowed by my memories of Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play, which I saw in 2015 (with my friend Stephanie as Bart) and was looking forward to seeing again at UMass this spring. Looks like they’ll do it in the fall – fingers crossed! I might re-read this after seeing the play again, as post-pandemic it will have new resonance. I read it fast, and I’m writing this on 5/2/2020 when the beginning of March feels like it was several years ago.
  • Emma – Jane Austen, 1815. Re-read in conjunction with the film, directed by friend-of-my-brother Autumn de Wilde. The film was amazing (saw it opening weekend right before everything shut down), stolen by Mrs. Elton (Tanya Reynolds) even though there wasn’t nearly as much about Maple Grove as in the book.
  • The Mouse and His Child – Russell Hoban, 1967. Comfort re-reading but also one of my top ten novels of all time. Description of Crow, the director of the Caws of Art avant-garde theater company: “A tall, well-set-up bird, he wore his great black, glossy wings in the manner of a cloak thrown carelessly over his shoulders…” Someday I’ll write a long essay about this amazing book.
  • Medallion Status: True Stories from Secret Rooms – John Hodgman, 2019. Enjoyable but I gobbled it down and don’t remember much now. Hodgman used to have a summer place near here and there were some local references which I always get a kick out of. He’s a good writer.
  • The Ends of the World: Supervolcanoes, Lethal Oceans, and the Search for Past Apocalypses – Peter Brannen, 2017 – quotes pulled, tbd
  • Krapp’s Last Tape – Samuel Beckett, 1958 – quotes pulled, tbd
  • Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson, 1980 – quotes pulled, tbd
  • Envious Casca – Georgette Heyer, 1941. This is a long-time favorite comfort re-read, but I like it less each time I read it. For some reason the romance used to be very compelling to me but is no longer. Still great characters but not as much humor as my favorite Heyers (on the whole she’s shrunk on me as an author as well…)
  • Worzel Gummidge – Barbara Euphan Todd, 1936. I had one of this series as a child but I don’t think it was this one – none of the other title descriptions look exactly right either, though. A strange book, but the idea of the TV Gummidge having “interchangeable turnip, mangelwurzel and swede heads” is even weirder…
  • Talking Turkey – Hilary Caws-Elwitt, unpublished mss (2014). Re-read my own book (middle-grade animal fantasy) when I had insomnia. It holds up!
  • Feast: True Love in and out of the Kitchen – Hannah Howard, 2018. Couldn’t put it down but I didn’t exactly enjoy it – too much self-hatred. I do love the way she writes about cheese.
  • Souls – Joanna Russ, 1982. I come back to this novella whenever I feel despair about the world, and it comforts me in a weird dark way.
  • The Iron Giant: A Children’s Story in Five Nights – Ted Hughes, 1968. Read frequently in childhood, and some of the images were burned into my brain. but I probably hadn’t revisited it in a couple of decades (not since the terrific Brad Bird movie, which was, gulp, 1989). It’s as wonderful as I remembered.

February 2020 books read

The Art of Frugal Hedonism: A Guide to Spending Less While Enjoying Everything More – Annie Raser-Rowland with Adam Grubb, 2017

I think I heard about this from the same source as Quit Like a Millionaire, but this one I loved. I borrowed it from the library but will put a copy on my to-buy list. There’s a nice website and ooh, an interview I plan on watching!

The book is similar in tone and optimism to my favorite financial blogger, Mr. Money Mustache, but even more focused on relishing day-to-day pleasures and the natural world. Some of the chapter titles capture this attitude: “Recalibrate your senses,” “Enjoy excess” (they throw a banana party when they have a glut of them), “Revel in the good brain chemistry of resourcefulness,” “Indulge your curiosity,” “It won’t be dull. We promise,” “Put on your favorite power anthem, and be the zeitgeist,” “Free up your frivolity,” “Sup at the cultural buffet,” and the last one, “Look up, think about constellations. Look down, think about magma.”

It’s Australian, so I learned the word “jaffle” (a toasted sandwich – now I want one of the cool fluted grills).

In the “Don’t be a sucker” chapter, about resisting advertising:

Be more content. Okay, easier said that done, but as author Douglas Rushkoff writes in his book Coercion, “the more fun you’re having in life, the more satisfied your are with yourself, the harder a target you are to reach.” You may have observed that people with an air of contentment with life, a mind fascinated by ideas, and strong connections with other people and the natural world are less susceptible to advertising. So make like a content person, and ignore the billboard! You are above such piffle!

In the frivolity chapter, contrasted to light-hearted spending:

Living light-heartedly is an altogether different beast. It involves being a bit philosophical about bad things that happen, so that they don’t dominate your mind or outlook. Or retaining the ability to take delight in fleeting moments. Or recognizing that being frivolous, spontaneous or playful with other humans and within your own head is a totally free present you can give to yourself and the people around you as often as you like. This stuff is the real assertion of freedom from the drabber elements of daily life: don’t get it confused with frivolous spending.

Beatlebone – Kevin Barry, 2015

Irish Writer’s Group selection. I mostly hated it! Using a real person, especially John Lennon, just feels lazy, even though it’s based on an actual incident in Lennon’s life. Constant references to external things (“Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush) w/o specifically identifying them, which usually bugs me. Example re Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I caught this morning morning’s fucking minion—the one where he sees a bird and goes all swoony coz he loves fucking nature.” Weird interspersion of first-person as-himself metafiction as he researches the book in New York and Ireland – I would have liked just that, as an essay, much better. In that section he says amusingly: “I would return to report my findings in a mature, honed prose, as clear as glass: this from a man who had never knowingly underfed an adjective.”

I looked up:

  • bevvied: drunk
  • boreen: narrow country lane
  • Liverpool time slip reports (note I do not believe in anything paranormal but find it interesting)

Quotes:

  • “Zola wrote that the road from Lourdes is littered with crutches but not a single wooden leg”
  • Depressed/unresponsive father (of the driver) “would look back at me, with the eyes like stones inside his head”
  • “He read once that the hare augurs darkly in the Irish mythology. From what he can remember there is fuck all that augurs brightly in the Irish mythology.”

Cornelius (the driver) asks what’s on his mind:

Love, blood, fate, death, sex, the void, mother, father, cunt and prick—these are the things on his mind.

Also—

How many more times are they going to ask me to come on The fucking Muppet Show?

I do like that italicized tmesis there! And the references to Radio Luxembourg (this is set in 1978 so right around when I was listening in my bedroom in Paris).

The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. – Daniel Defoe, 1722

Forbes Great Books selection. What a fascinating book – we had a great discussion, and it’s one of the most memorable titles we’ve read.

Defoe starts by saying that “there is not a wicked action in any part of it, but is first and last rendered unhappy and unfortunate” but what comes through is the focus on money, on survival, whatever it takes. “I am giving an account of what was, not of what ought or ought not to be.” “The vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.” Moll’s self-interest makes her emotional responses of guilt wear off quickly. Useful warnings to the reader against being too trusting. It also emphasizes how fabric was so valuable – a bundle of lace was worth 300 pounds in money of the time!

  • “all I understood by being a gentlewoman was to be able to work for myself, and get enough to keep me without that terrible bugbear going to service, whereas they meant to live great, rich and high, and I know not what”
  • Old governess comforting her: “to sink under the Weight, was but to encrease the Weight”
  • Transportation: “we should live as new People in a new World”

it was requisite to a whore to be handsome, well-shaped, have a good mien and a graceful behaviour; but that for a wife, no deformity would shock the fancy, no ill qualities the judgment; the money was the thing; the portion was neither crooked nor monstrous, but the money was always agreeable, whatever the wife was.

I’d love to find out more about this: “A Garbling Office has been established in London in the fifteenth century to inspect several Sorts of Goods, more particularly subject to Frauds, Mixtures and false Package, in order to cleanse them, and make them Merchantable)” (Review, iv 635, 17 Feb 1708)

Salt: A World History – Mark Kurlansky, 2002

Read for Nature and Environment. It started with a great intro about a chunk of salt from Cardona and its strange behavior on the author’s windowsill. I learned a ton of fascinating things, but it was overall kind of a disappointing hodgepodge. Kurlansky is sometimes confusing, and a few things I looked up turned out to be wrong. He claims that “Ragoût de berniques, literally a stew made of nothing, was in fact made of potatoes, carrots, and onions” but actually it looks like berniques are limpets. He describes Nehemiah Grew as “a British plant physiologist who is credited with being the first human ever to witness and document plants having sex” – a bizarre way to describe proposing a theory of sexual reproduction in plants. The photo of salt subsidence linked below was captioned “in Castle, Cheshire” whereas it’s Castle STREET in Norwich, Cheshire. I was a little shocked that such a thorough researcher would describe sardines as belonging to the Clupeidea family – sardines are not a species but rather any of a set of small fish (i.e. all Clupeidea might be sardines, but not all sardines are Clupeidea). I’m nitpicking, but very glad we read it.

I looked up or learned:

  • Kahm yeast
  • Oxalme (vinegar brine sauce)
  • In Sichuan province, natural gas was being used to boil off brine in AD 200
  • Small onions were placed in the eye sockets of the mummy of Ramses the IV
  • Tarim mummies
  • Cod preserves so well because it has almost no fat in its flesh
  • I knew the gabelle was something the French hated that led to the revolution, but I thought it was a work requisition. I didn’t realize it was a tax on salt – also “sel du devoir,” forced purchase of 7 kg of salt per year per person over the age of 8, but you couldn’t use it to make salted products or you’d be charged with “faux saunage,” salt fraud.
  • Herring light and/or herring lightning – interesting phenomena around their huge schools
  • The Polish national poem, Pan Tadeusz, says “sliced saukraut… just walks into the mouth” (re bigos, the equivalent of choucroute garni)
  • “Anglo Saxons called a saltworks a wich, and any place in England where the name ends in ‘wich’ at one time produced salt”
  • An incredibly detailed method for curing salmon specifies the barrel “is to be stamped or leaped upon by a youth of about 15 years old or thereabouts”
  • Bell metal: bronze with a high tin percentage
  • Saltworks near Syracuse had watchtowers with bells to be rung when rain threatened so the workers and their families, who lived nearby, could rush over and pull covers over the vats. “Entire families ran to the saltworks, competing with each other to be first to cover a complete row. Winning families got small cash prizes.”
  • Small amounts of nitrates are still allowed for the “oddly unquestioned goal of making ham reddish” (apparently the color was a side effect of the preserving process)
  • Early chemistry said “sugar is a salt”
  • Birdseye discovered that flash-freezing preserved food better “because of a principle every salt maker knew: Rapid crystallization creates small crystals, and slow crystallization produces large ones.”
  • The history of subsidence in Cheshire (great photo from the book) led me to learn about “bastard brine,” which I can’t believe Kurlansky didn’t include!
  • The British tried to prevent salt smuggling in India in the 1840s by creating an impenetrable thorn Great Hedge hundreds of miles long
  • The Dead Sea was named Asphalt Lake by the Romans and blocks of asphalt can be found floating in it
  • The old crest of Turks and Caicos sometimes has a little door drawn on one of the salt piles because “the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos”
  • This is probably true of mines in general: “When equipment is no longer useful, it is not considered cost effective to take it apart and bring it back up, so the mine leaves a trail of abandoned equipment, a junkyard on the side of some of the wide shafts.”
  • Liberty Style was the Italian Art Nouveau
  • “After thousands of years of struggle to make salt white and of even grain, affluent people will now pay more for salts that are odd shapes and colors”

Acids search for an electron that they lack, and bases try to shed an extra one. Together they make a well-balanced compound, a salt. …
It turned out that salt was a microcosm for one of the oldest concepts of nature and the order of the universe. From the fourth-century-B.C. Chinese belief in the forces of yin and yang, to most of the world’s religions, to modern science, to the basic principles of cooking, there has always been a belief that two opposing forces find completion—one recieving a missing part and the other shedding an extra one. A salt is a small but perfect thing.

As brine boiling was fading, Sichuan engineers found a new use for the natural gas at the wells. Buses were built with giant gray bladders on the roofs, filled with the local natural gas. They started out on their routes with the huge rectangular bladder on top almost as big as the bus. The big bladder swayed and jiggled like Jell-O as the bus rounded corners, and then it gradually deflated, the gray bag sagging from the roof, as the gas was used up. Locals call the buses da qi bao, which means “big bag of gas.” The buses need frequent refueling.

It’s true! Here’s a great photo, and a very informative article on the history of such transport in Low Tech magazine.