Infinite Jest

A morning walk. It has become a regular thing again, once every other day, thanks to the steady, if punitive, weather and the lack of mowing days, and also thanks to the pretty steady sleep I have been enjoying. If I am up by seven and the weather is clear, there is no reason why not to go out and do my thing.

It was nice to be able to feed the ducks again. It had been a couple of weeks since I have been able to get some cracked corn. The ducks are starving. I suppose people don't come out to the pond as often during the hard summer and it is a leaner time for our feathered friends. Maybe the public employees will even go back to refilling the feeders when the weather gets cooler.

I took "Infinite Jest" with me. I was surprised to find myself laughing so hard and so much. The first chapter on the college admissions interview is eternal literary gold. Maybe I should not have held off as long as I did. Hell, I had practically decided that I was going to finish the rest of my left without ever bothering to pick up the Wallace novel. Oh, I still expect to find myself trudging through a number of long, seemingly endless longueurs, that there is some tough 'going' ahead, but I am more confident now that I will find a lot of juicy fruit and fun stuff along the way. And I think I have a better idea about the legend behind the man, David Foster Wallace, and I feel more of the sharp poignancy behind his suicide.

Magnified Reading

Magnifying glasses are so wedded to my books in my reading life, and it is funny to think that I must approach the text as if through a window. I actually kind of like that. One looks out of a window to see what is going on in the world around one, and so it is, for me, with the literary world, and it is as though one is falling through the looking-glass into richer, more wondrous realms of heartaching beauty. Of course, I would prefer to have perfect eyesight, or even just the vision that I had when I was young, but it is probably good to see the enchanted side of one's weaknesses as the world seems to grow dimmer and dimmer.

Mighty Casey at the Bat

I came upon another round of "Casey at the Bat" in my reading and was in a googly mood. Wikipedia gives us an interesting note. This poem was Ernest Thayer's one strike of lightning, one of the world's one-hit wonders. For those of us who have zero hits and are striking out throughout our entire life, this is still an enviable fact. The interesting note is that Thayer apparently was never able to do justice to his poem upon the recitation. This quote was even included in Thayer's New York Times's obituary in August of 1940.

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"Thayer indubitably wrote 'Casey,' but he could not recite it.... I have heard many others give 'Casey.' Fond mamas have brought their sons to me to hear their childish voices lisp the poem, but Thayer's was the worst of all. In a sweet, dulcet Harvard whisper he implored 'Casey' to murder the umpire, and gave this cry of mass animal rage all the emphasis of a caterpillar wearing rubbers crawling on a velvet carpet. He was rotten."

-- DeWolf Hopper, a comedian who helped to make the poem famous

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Pop is barbecuing

Pop is barbecuing and Kay is doing her potato salad routine. The barbecue usually annoys me, and still does, going in and out and giving the flies and mosquitoes an open invitation to try indoor life with us. However, I consoled myself with the thought that Kay is indeed helping to rejuvenate him a little, putting him back in his sixties, or at least to the way he was just last summer, a good vigorous middle-age. But the summer of 2013 has been rough on him. When I watch him, I can see his elderliness. He is moving very slowly and often seems a little confused. It was the summer of 2013 that left him as a frail old man. Well, might this at least mean that he will be less inclined to barbecue down the road? I doubt it. He can be pretty silly.