May 13, 2020

Spent most of the day reviewing the papers that will be discussed at Friday's P&S board meeting. Met my barbecue group at a park in Chapel Hill today for lunch. We stood in the parking lot and kept our social distance. The park itself was closed, but the parking lot was not.

Watched two episodes of Ozark. Studied French and Old English. Listened to another 600 or so lines of Beowulf in Old English.

Went for an hour-long walk this afternoon.

Read the poems in the new New Yorker and a review of a collection of poems by Wanda Coleman, whom I had never heard of before. The reviewer, Dan Chiasson, I adore--I wish I could write about poetry like he does. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

June 30, 2020

Read more today from Understanding Poetry . Studied French. For dinner made a salad of green beans, red bell peppers, and watercress. This afternoon I had a craving for McDonald's French fries, so I went and got some. Finished watching season 1 of Stumptown .
Read more

June 27, 2020

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
Read more

June 25, 2020

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
Read more