It’s Sunday night. I have a four year old chanting in the next room, "mommy, mommy, mom." He fell asleep in the car ride back from the city late this afternoon, and it has blown his bedtime. Older boy is sacked out on the top bunk. We hit the Medieval festival in Manhattan today, so Jonah is hopefully dreaming about falcons and mighty swords. Steve’s out in the garage reading another book on Rome and smoking a Nat Sherman cigar, a leftover from his high school reunion last week. I don’t quite see the point of cigars. You just keep all that smoke in your mouth? But he’s amused.
Two of my favorite writers have new books coming out. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Cormac McCarthy’s subject in his new novel is as big as it gets: the end of the civilized world, the dying of life on the planet and the spectacle of it all. He has written a visually stunning picture of how it looks at the end to two pilgrims on the road to nowhere. Color in the world — except for fire and blood — exists mainly in memory or dream. Fire and firestorms have consumed forests and cities, and from the fall of ashes and soot everything is gray, the river water black. Hydrangeas and wild orchids stand in the forest, sculptured by fire into “ashen effigies” of themselves, waiting for the wind to blow them over into dust. Intense heat has melted and tipped a city’s buildings, and window glass hangs frozen down their walls. On the Interstate “long lines of charred and rusting cars” are “sitting in a stiff gray sludge of melted rubber. … The incinerate corpses shrunk to the size of a child and propped on the bare springs of the seats. Ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts.”
On Saturday, we watched Walk the Line
It’s been a mellow couple of days. I read Sunday’s Times from cover to cover. I sadly paused at the sports section. Right now, every Yankee fan is looking into her heart and wondering whether she can root for the Mets for the rest of the season. And the answer is no.
I also spent a lot of time doing basic life maintenance chores. We had to do the clothing purge. 6 paper bags of worn shirts and tight jeans are waiting by the front door to be thrown in the Good Will bins behind Shop Rite. I also spent days organizing my computer and repairing old wounds. Backing up my hard drive has become a major chore, and it took some time to research the best way to go about it. The online options weren’t big enough. For the same price, I purchased a 6 gig flash drive. There was a big learning curve, and it involved lots of trips to the Apple Store. Yeah, technology is such a time saver.
I pulled up the summer’s tomato vines which grew quite jungley in the small corner of the backyard. By the end of July, I had a thicket of green tomatoes. Trouble is that they never turned orange. Just stayed green for the rest of summer, as the sun moved to another corner of the yard and never gave the green tomatoes a second glance. I picked three bags worth of green tomatoes today. Some I wrapped in newspaper to ripen, which is my dad’s method. Others I just left in the paper bag, but threw in two apples, which is my mom’s method. I’m going to have the bags of tomatoes battle it out.
Okay, it’s another week at 11D. I want to write a post about my last APSA paper and highlight some of the blogs featured in the paper. There were also a couple of papers that I picked up at the conference that I’ve been meaning to discuss. But I’m easily distracted, so no promises.
Apt. 11d 