Thesaurus Writer

Studied French this morning. Read several more chapters from The Flowering of New England . I went to the grocery store today and bought the following: 2 pounds strawberries (already from California now; local strawberries are done) 1 bag frozen mango 1 bag frozen cherries body oil 3 cans evaporated milk 2 avocados Made a strawberry pie:  https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/15836/strawberry-pie-ii/ . My gelatinous mixture was a lot paler than in the pictures. Maybe it was because I used flour instead of cornstarch. Or maybe I didn't mash the strawberries enough. Still, I ate almost half the pie today. Watched a few episodes of Stumptown .

Yesterday I met J.B. for coffee at Guglhupf. We sat outside on the patio. More people there than I expected. We talked about the virus and how economists could say something meaningful about the present moment. Work they don't value suddenly showing its value, such as cooking meals at home. I told him about my podcast ambitions, and he suggested a few podcasts that could be models for me: Michael Lewis's podcast, a podcast about presidential elections titled Wicked Game, and a podcast called Origins, which is about TV shows.  Last night A.R. brought Chinese over for dinner. Today we had an outing. We drove to Pittsboro and had breakfast under the pecan trees at the Small Cafe. Then we drove to Saxapahaw, which really is just a cross-roads village--no sidewalks, no place to walk. We tried going to the island park there, but decided there were too many people. We went inside the general store for a few minutes. I bought a roll of paper towels and a jar of muscadine jelly. We then

I basically nap from four to six everyday now. Today, I napped from four until seven. It's not that I'm not sleeping well. I typically go to bed at midnight and wake up at 8:00 or so. I think it's just my way of dealing with the boredom of living during a pandemic--and to escape from the depredations of the federal government. I started reading a book that I've known about since I think eleventh-grade English: Van Wick Brooks's The Flowering of New England . Strange how that book--or at least its title--has been with me for so long. It's a history of the literature that came of out New England in the nineteenth century. So, Emerson, Whitman, Hawthorne, Longfellow, et al. It's written in an impressionist, conversational tone--not academic at all. In fact, there are no sources cited. The author calls his style the narrative style. It doesn't read like a novel; I wouldn't go that far. But it reads as character sketches. The first two or three chapters s

So my niece H. has been in labor all day. Her labor was induced--not sure why. I've been lacking motivation--not wanting to read another word of an academic article. Managed to finish editing a client's paper on Cowles and the Theory of Games and a copyedited paper for P&S  (the intro to a special issue on societies under stress). Been reading nineteenth-century American poetry. Not much lover poetry there. Mostly nature poetry. Memorizing Whitman. Didn't leave the apartment all day. Been watching Marcella . Season 2 was pretty intense. Am now on Season 3.

I finished edited a book proposal and sample chapter on Japanese historians of economics for a client. I reviewed a copyedited article on support for welfare programs for Politics & Society . Read William Cullen Bryant. Am unsure now about my podcast ideas, except that I want the episodes to be little stories that deal with poems or poets. I sampled several poetry podcasts today, and they were are mediocre at best and dull at worst. Most are simply recorded interviews. None had solo hosts.

I spent most of the day listening to a Duke webinar on being black at Duke. Faculty, administrators, and students shared their race-related research and their experiences with racism, at Duke and elsewhere. There was big talk from the provost about improving conditions and hiring more blacks. We'll see what happens. The president seems committed to change. The past several days I have been obsesses with a podcast I'm developing. The podcast will be on poetry. Right now, I'm thinking of either episodes that survey the literature on a poet as a whole or on a particular poem. What will I enjoy more? Went for three short walks today, probably totaling around 50 minutes. Another cloudy, drizzly day in the 60s.