May 9, 2020

A chilly but sunny morning. I went for a long walk, much of it into a stiff wind. I had to put on a light jacket. And we're a week into May! As I walked I kept referring to some index cards on which I had written the first few lines of Beowulf, in Old English.

My cousin JH called. Her mother died yesterday. JH was with her, in the hospital. She said that her mother was fighting going. A nurse suggested that my cousin tell her that if she sees her husband beckoning to her, it's ok to join him. She told her mother that, and then she didn't seem to fight as much anymore.

I watched a couple of episodes of Ozark and then took a nap. I then ordered a pizza to be delivered to AR's, and I went there for dinner and to play a game of Tram Bahn.

Studied French and Old English.

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