Three days later, now, in the late afternoon of the 7th of March, rain has coated everything in a soft harbinger of this coming spring's temper. The drip outside my window, the chirruping of the robins, too, accent the sepia humidity in today's daylight.
It's been awhile since I've done this.
It's been another eek-ly week again of terrible news. From the international to the local, the nearly constant storms throw up their torments. It's felt so bad with everything breaking or broken, or only partly mended, and for so long, that there remains little energy to talk about it. But President Biden gave a determined State of the Union Address to the US Congress this evening of the 7th. Here, it begins at 27 minutes into this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u42TQs4Pf2c
But despite this there is much to be grateful over for those who can. With a barest employment I work not more than 32 hours a week which in turn covers rent, utilities, food and a much-valued satchel of discretionary spending. This is a norm and an expectation of social/civil accord established for most people of a certain age in the US: to pay for one's keep. And for most that means work, or some form of labor for pay.
The time that I work also allows for leisure time. Notice how this is constructed. Work is prior to leisure through the necessities demanded by regular, routine payment of enough forms of individual infrastructure - the material forms in housing, utilities, groceries - that can enable what is obtainable for security, heat/AC, water, lights & nowadays, cable.
But with enough time off, at least I can read and watch the comedy shows on cable. Not much of a 'freedom to afford' in this life, but for now almost enough.
Today's reading list is as wide-ranging as ever.
"Iraq's Twenty Years of Carnage" by Joshua Hammer reviews two new books covering Iraq and it's twenty-first century.
The Art of Fiction 123 in The Paris Review issue 118 is a too-short George Plimpton interview with Tom Wolfe c. 1990. Bonfire of the Vanities was his most recent magnum opus.
Edith Wharton's A Son At the Front (1923) tells the modern story of a young person flinging themselves into the uncertain future.
F. Scott Fitzgerald's Beautiful and Damned (1922)finds Anthony and Gloria Patch (nee Gilbert) just learning that they will not receive his grandfather's largesse any longer since his death left the two "high-livers" out of his will.
In the years that followed Rebecca West wrote a 1200 page 'travelogue' detailing her six-week exploration of Yugoslavia in 1937. Half way through that she goes into great detail revealing the horrific tale when the Serbs killed their last King Alexander mostly over his Queen Draga Masin, on June 11, 1903. And this was not fiction. Not fiction at all. In the chapters on Sarajevo, West also tells the tale of Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie's death, 28June1914.
