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radiantfractureI am sitting at LB's kitchen table tidying various scraps of work in the hopes of having a clean plate when the giant meatloaf of final marking drops there on Thursday.
I am drinking a small glass of beet kvass, which LB brews in jars on her counter. This is not the kvass made of fermented rye bread. There's nothing in the jar but beets, water, and salt.
"And time", says LB. And time.
The final liquid (inasmuch as it has a final state -- like all fermented drinks it's a process, not a product) is a deep, almost glowing fuchisa.
It's not like anything I ever drank before I drank it, but it's very refreshing: cool, earthy, slightly salty, and tingling with fermental stew.
LB, S, and I are gym buddies, which is a bad thing as we are all very lazy and dislike effort of any kind. Generally we do the briefest possible workout and then go downstairs to float in the kiddie pool.
Somehow we made it to the gym on Sunday night, although if anything we were all grumpier and lazier and more passionately opposed to exertion than usual.
I usually listen to music during the brief workout phase, but I felt perverse, so I put on podcasts instead, which are intellectually interesting but do not motivate me to physical effort.
Flipping through, refreshing the podcasts, I discovered that author and broadcaster Frank Delaney died about six weeks ago, on February 21. Here's the Guardian obituary.
You may know that Delaney's podcast Re:Joyce took on the absurdly ambitious task of doing a line-by-line deconstruction of Ulysses -- all the references, the quadruple entendres, the multilingual play.
I don’t remember how I heard about Re:Joyce. I do a lot of scraping of iTunes for literary podcasts. I've been listening since Re:Joyce's inception, though lately I'd fallen a bit into podcast fatigue syndrome. The podcast was always worth a listen, though – a great fallback of literary discussion. Because there's something wrong with me, I would have liked even more close reading and referencing of some passages, but as a whole, the podcast is a tour de force.
The half-joking concept was that Delaney would get to the end of the book in – I forget – fifteen years or so? Far enough that he and you and I all knew it wasn't a sure thing, though not impossible, but there was so much life in Ulysses and so much pleasure in his reading that you felt carried along by his enthusiasm. There's always an end, but I wasn’t expecting the end so soon.
The podcast has 368 episode, including the "Baker's Dozen" episodes about Joyce's life and other works. In six and a half years, Delaney got as far as page 192 of the 680-page Gabler edition (segment 9 of Chapter 10, as Delaney noted). Episode 368 was released less than a week before he died.
I'm sad that I'll never get to hear him chortle his way through "Circe."
Anyway, I recommend the podcast, whether you've read Ulysses or not, and I certainly recommend Ulysses, which for me is that great humane book that East of Eden was for my friends.
After this news, in a starker mood, I thought I'd switch to the treadmill and try, for the first time since being ill, to do something that approximated running. Running means listening to Zombies, Run! I'd just started up the intro when I heard an alarm that was not part of the script. I took off my headphones. The fire alarm was sounding.
We obediently trouped outside in gym clothes and swimsuits and hastily assembled towels. Two fire trucks showed up, and heavily equipped fire fighters entered the building. You could see them through the glass, stomping around the pool deck.
There was, apparently, no fire, and eventually they let us all back in, but by then we'd given up on health and went straight to the pool. Well, I swam a few laps. Okay, three.
After the gym, we made a run by the late-night grocery. S. wanted breakfasts and I'd forgotten to get cookies for my classes. It is presentation week and therefore it is also cookie week.
So that was my Sunday -- zombies, death, and cookies. And time.
{rf}
I am drinking a small glass of beet kvass, which LB brews in jars on her counter. This is not the kvass made of fermented rye bread. There's nothing in the jar but beets, water, and salt.
"And time", says LB. And time.
The final liquid (inasmuch as it has a final state -- like all fermented drinks it's a process, not a product) is a deep, almost glowing fuchisa.
It's not like anything I ever drank before I drank it, but it's very refreshing: cool, earthy, slightly salty, and tingling with fermental stew.
LB, S, and I are gym buddies, which is a bad thing as we are all very lazy and dislike effort of any kind. Generally we do the briefest possible workout and then go downstairs to float in the kiddie pool.
Somehow we made it to the gym on Sunday night, although if anything we were all grumpier and lazier and more passionately opposed to exertion than usual.
I usually listen to music during the brief workout phase, but I felt perverse, so I put on podcasts instead, which are intellectually interesting but do not motivate me to physical effort.
Flipping through, refreshing the podcasts, I discovered that author and broadcaster Frank Delaney died about six weeks ago, on February 21. Here's the Guardian obituary.
You may know that Delaney's podcast Re:Joyce took on the absurdly ambitious task of doing a line-by-line deconstruction of Ulysses -- all the references, the quadruple entendres, the multilingual play.
I don’t remember how I heard about Re:Joyce. I do a lot of scraping of iTunes for literary podcasts. I've been listening since Re:Joyce's inception, though lately I'd fallen a bit into podcast fatigue syndrome. The podcast was always worth a listen, though – a great fallback of literary discussion. Because there's something wrong with me, I would have liked even more close reading and referencing of some passages, but as a whole, the podcast is a tour de force.
The half-joking concept was that Delaney would get to the end of the book in – I forget – fifteen years or so? Far enough that he and you and I all knew it wasn't a sure thing, though not impossible, but there was so much life in Ulysses and so much pleasure in his reading that you felt carried along by his enthusiasm. There's always an end, but I wasn’t expecting the end so soon.
The podcast has 368 episode, including the "Baker's Dozen" episodes about Joyce's life and other works. In six and a half years, Delaney got as far as page 192 of the 680-page Gabler edition (segment 9 of Chapter 10, as Delaney noted). Episode 368 was released less than a week before he died.
I'm sad that I'll never get to hear him chortle his way through "Circe."
Anyway, I recommend the podcast, whether you've read Ulysses or not, and I certainly recommend Ulysses, which for me is that great humane book that East of Eden was for my friends.
After this news, in a starker mood, I thought I'd switch to the treadmill and try, for the first time since being ill, to do something that approximated running. Running means listening to Zombies, Run! I'd just started up the intro when I heard an alarm that was not part of the script. I took off my headphones. The fire alarm was sounding.
We obediently trouped outside in gym clothes and swimsuits and hastily assembled towels. Two fire trucks showed up, and heavily equipped fire fighters entered the building. You could see them through the glass, stomping around the pool deck.
There was, apparently, no fire, and eventually they let us all back in, but by then we'd given up on health and went straight to the pool. Well, I swam a few laps. Okay, three.
After the gym, we made a run by the late-night grocery. S. wanted breakfasts and I'd forgotten to get cookies for my classes. It is presentation week and therefore it is also cookie week.
So that was my Sunday -- zombies, death, and cookies. And time.
{rf}
