Poem

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Tune to the frequency of the wood and you’ll hear
the deer, breathing; a muscle, tensing; the sigh
of a fieldmouse under an owl. Now

listen to yourself—that friction—the push-and-drag,
the double pulse, the drum. You can hear it, clearly.
You can hear the sound of your body, breaking down.

If you’re very quiet, you might pick up loss: or rather
the thin noise that losing makes—perdition.
If you’re absolutely silent

and still, you can hear nothing
but the sound of nothing: this voice
and its wasting, the soul’s tinsel. Listen . . . Listen . . .

-- “Tinsel” by Robin Robertson

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I had a little trouble with the word 'tinsel' and thought it was fouling up the poem, but Dictionary.com relieved my doubts with this definition: "anything showy or attractive with little or no real worth; showy pretense".

Neighbor Dog

Taking care of the trash this morning, I was ready to snack up the neighbor dog, but he was nowhere in sight. The temperature was forecast to fall to 32 degrees and colder. Maybe they actually brought the dog inside. That would be so wonderful. That presumably would give those people more of an opportunity to see the dog and be with him. What is not to love about that dog? Even after a lifetime of neglect and deprivation, he still has a lot of warmth and love in him. I like to think that I helped with that, giving him what affection and companionship I can through a fence.

Tuesday

64 degrees outside with the sun shining bright. I think it is time to shut off the heater and open some windows - freshen the air in the house a little - at least for a few hours. The wintry chill will return tonight.

Ian McEwan

"In the mideighties I was a grateful convert to computers. Word processing is more intimate, more like thinking itself. In retrospect, the typewriter seems a gross mechanical obstruction."

-- Ian McEwan at The Paris Review

Pop's Driver's license.

Pop was unable to renew his driver's license. The state has become more demanding. Since he is diabetic and is on psychiatric medication, he needs to take the driver's test again. The timing is particularly bad. He waited till close to his birthday and we are up against the holidays. If he cannot schedule a test this week, he will have to wait until December. Personally, putting aside the question of timing and scheduling, I do not think that passing the test will be a slam dunk. What we will do if he cannot drive is something I do not even want to think about until that bridge caves in and falls on us. We will just hope that Pop still has some of that vitality in him that he can manage to jump through the state's new hoops, but he is way too old for these games.

Sugar

I caught Sugar's interview at one of those radio-podcast shows that upper-middle-class people put on in a bid to be a voice in the world. She is so good, though, she could grace a top-caliber program. Her voice, her command over the subject matter. She was talking about the Jian Ghomeshi scandal in Canada and about the problems of rape and sexual abuse in general. I feel as though I could as well be listening to an A-list public intellectual, albeit without the scholarly, philosophical depth. She cannot be a professor, but she could do the top-line chat shows, as well as write pieces for the top magazines and newspapers. Let me put it this way: she is better than Horace, my old UT roommate.

It's just funny to think that I once got to exchange a lot of e-conversations with her. She was still very young, and being unable to succeed through the traditional route of the university, she was vulnerably lost in terms of being able to find a good place in her world, and the wonder of the Internet is that it allows for the most unlikely connections, even if they are usually short-lived. It was one of the best pieces of strange luck in my most dreary life that I was able to chat with her a lot for those couple of years and actually be rather chummy. Just one of those odd things.

https://escapevelocityradio.com/episodes/detail/episode-26-jian-ghomeshi-consent-assault-and-justice-with-melissa-martin

Lolita

Lolita’s inauspicious debut took place in Paris, where it appeared in 1955 under the imprint of the Olympia Press, known for the frank sexual content of its publications. As Andrew Field ironically observes, Lolita was “probably the most chaste book ever printed by Olympia,” whose list sported such titles as White Thighs and The Sexual life of Robinson Crusoe.

-- Ellen Pifer, “Vladimir Naokov’s Lolita: A Casebook”

The first readers looking for a quick wankfest were doubtlessly surprised and annoyed, needing a dictionary to read the damn thing. No pictures, either.