See you tomorrow

I don't think I'll get to finish today's post today. Hopefully there'll be two tomorrow.

Christmas kicked my ass

All the various bustlings and whatnot -- the whatnot especially -- and now the wife and I are going to see "The Little Dog Laughed" in Culver City so no post today. It's Plutarch, so I'll try to double up tomorrow, but no promises.

Work suspended

When I started this blog I knew my dad would love it; after all, they were his volumes that all my childhood were in the bookcase in the upstairs hall, before I shipped them across the country to the bookcase in this upstairs hall. After a couple of weeks, when I proved to myself that I could do this every day, I opened up the blog and told him. He did love it, and on days when I didn't feel like reading or writing I did it anyway, because I knew he'd be checking in, and his enjoyment of it would keep me going and made me feel good.

Today my dad received the last rites. It's time for me to go back across the country one last time on his behalf, like I did last week; but last week he could tell Mad Men-like stories about working for the Travelers' Insurance in Boston in 1960, and today he can't talk at all. And no longer will I sit at my desk here in LA, and smack a post about one of these readings across the Net and wait for him to return it. Our game is called on account of darkness.

I'll return at some point in the next couple of weeks. I want to see the year out -- now more than ever, really.

Melanoma got him, and quickly. Wear your sunscreen.

UPDATE: I suddenly remembered that he copied out these lines (from "Arkansas Traveller," by Charles Wright) and had them on his desk:

Knot by knot I untie myself from the past
And let it rise away from me like a balloon.
What a small thing it becomes.
What a bright tweak at the vanishing point, blue on blue.

November 3: No Pliny today

I am travelling without my books, and my Daily Reading Guide link can't possibly be right: I was assured that I was to get a ringside seat to Christian persecution, but instead I find letters from Pliny to Trajan about stuff like what the interest rates should be; interesting, in a way -- if only because it gives me the sense that the Christians were just another in a long line of pains in the ass to the provincial governor -- but, in another and more realistic way, completely uninteresting.

Tomorrow we will return with stirring tales from the French drama that couldn't be less relevant to the election.

No post today

Blog post, anyway. There might be goal posts as I'm going to the Kings game tonight. However, I have done the reading (Charles Lyell) and may, repeat may, be able to write about it tomorrow, which would suit me fine because then I wouldn't have to read any more Robert Burns.

In the meantime, enjoy Anze Kopitar:

The arrears continue

Father Knickerbocker understands.

I'm sorry to get these things up so late but that's the price I pay for working these days. And I may not get to today's reading because I want to watch the World Series on Tivo. Don't tell me in comments who wins!

October 16: Not much to say

for once. And I have actual work reading to do (some producer has bought a book and wants to adapt it). So here are the links to Hippocrates' Oath and Law and you can talk among yourself. This is a good general rule of thumb, though:

But inexperience is a bad treasure, and a bad fund to those who possess it, whether in opinion or reality, being devoid of self-reliance and contentedness, and the nurse both of timidity and audacity. For timidity betrays a want of powers, and audacity a lack of skill.

I forget that recklessness is a part of inexperience, but, given some of the spec scripts I've read (and used to write), I really shouldn't.

As Hippocrates himself would say, Be Well.

Holy Geez

I forgot to post! I've read it and everything. I'll try to get to post-bedtimes. In the meantime, please enjoy Look Around You:

It's not going to let up

I thought I could get it in, but I think I'm going to have to call today's post on account of rain (of work).

It will be rescheduled as part of a doubleheader tomorrow, requiring separate admissions.

Regrets

It's this or the bad Cervantes translation.

The press of the day will make me unable to get to the reading today, unless I do it when I get home from the Dodger game. But I will try to do today's and tomorrow's tomorrow, when they will be yesterday and today's.

UPDATE: The Dodgers got skunked so the teams I'm rooting for are 0-2 when I mention that I'm going to go see them. We did get free flip books, however.

September 15: Well, I tried

Maybe my problem is reading Dante in shirt & tie. I should try something more comfortable like this.

I've complained about the Dante translation before; the past couple of times the reading's been from the Inferno, so I can just turn to my Pinsky and figure it out. But what happens when it's Canto XXIV of the as-yet-untranslated-or-if-it-is-translated-unowned-by-me "Paradiso"? Nothing, that's what. (Note: long compound adjective probably one word in German.) I can't make head or tail of it. It doesn't help that our text appears to be a theological discussion:

“The deep things,” I replied, “which here I scan
Distinctly, are below from mortal eye
So hidden, they have in belief alone
Their being; on which credence, hope sublime
Is built: and, therefore substance, it intends.

As Dante did not say, Oy.

So....how was everyone's weekend? The wife and I saw "Burn After Reading," which we enjoyed very much. It's really too small a movie to have a summarizable theme, but if it did it would be that Americans are too dumb to be the proprietors of a giant national security establishment. I'd go along with that. But maybe that's for tomorrow, which is the Farewell Address.

September 1: Be It Resolved

WHEREAS, the William Penn reading for today has previously done been read;

and it is a national holiday celebrating the glorious heritage of labor, in which I get to be included because I went on strike this year, even though, unlike miners, say, I got cupcakes from Reese Witherspoon's assistant;

and, additionally, I have various and sundry things to do today;

that among these things are going to the Rose Bowl to see a man about a clock-cleaning (I am actually related by marriages to both Tennessee and UCLA but choose UT, wisely I think);

therefore I'm not writing anything new today (Note: I don't like the old Penn post, but here's a post about the Quakers I still kind of like.)

I feel bad, though. To make it up to you, here's Roy Clark doing "Rocky Top" Brady Bunch-style, plus Muppets:


UPDATE (9/2) -- Was my face red (or orange)! Plus I owe my UCLA kin some country ham.

August 27: I quit

for today. I think you might need a day off too; tell your boss I said so.

Or, you can do what I cannot and read more Robert Burns.

Until tomorrow.

July 18: No thanks

Right in the beginning of A Blot in the 'Scutcheon", which I'm sure is a fine verse play, I read:

Second Retainer. Now, Gerard, out with it!
What makes you sullen, this of all the days
I’ the year? To-day that young rich bountiful
Handsome Earl Mertoun, whom alone they match
With our Lord Tresham through the country-side,
Is coming here in utmost bravery
To ask our master’s sister’s hand?

My eyes roll, audibly. You've got the lords and earls and the retainers and the exposition and the master's sister's hand...it's too much for me. Like TMQ, I wrote "Game Over" in my notebook.

See you tomorrow.

Have a good weekend

A friend of ours (not in the GoodFellas sense) has just loaned us her beach house. See you Monday, possibly.

Gone picklin'

It's time to take a little break from The Best That Has Been Thought And Said. The family and I are travelling East, where we will see members of my family (who are the core audience of this blog), and also TV-director-turned-master-pickler Rick Field.

(Seriously, order (or procure, if you're Whole Foods-adjacent) a jar of his Windy City Wasabeans, and, even if you make your guests fish them out of the jar with their fingers, they will still give you the respect and esteem reserved for elite society hostesses. )

The dilletantism should resume sometime next week -- Tuesday or Wednesday, maybe.

Off day

Today's Daily Reading Guide is supposed to be a scene from the Duchess of Malfi, but the pages they tell you to read put you somewhere in Beaumont and Fletcher.

I'm taking this as a sign that I should have an off day.

Happy Mother's Day, everybody!

(Based on the plot synopsis "The Duchess of Malfi" sounds like great Mother's Day reading.)

Skip day

Meetings, for some reason, have been popping up out of nowhere, so I find myself to be v. tired tonight, too tired for Don Quixote. I'm giving myself the night off.

The tiring part of it isn't the driving all around Los Angeles, it's the having to be perky and upbeat. If I were naturally perky and upbeat, why on earth would I have gone into comedy? Comedy people, as a class, do not score high in the people-skills department, although many of them are perfectly charming once the ice is broken. Strangers, however, can be difficult.

In the meantime my son is playing this YouTube thing over and over, so I don't see why y'all shouldn't have to hear it too:

No posting today

It's my anniversary :)

Another sick-out

I'm actually not that sick, just tired from a long day's driving, and completely uninspired by today's pudding-like translation of Faust (click the link and see for yourself, but do not read this translation and drive). It can take some energy to dig up a take when none presents itself.

I often ask myself why I'm doing this; the closest thing I can compare it to is another midlife project, training to run a marathon -- similarly useless, but something nice to look back on having done. So today's a day when I'm cutting my miles short.

I will note that I read Faust for a German class I took in college, very poorly I might add, and that me and a couple of other guys in the back row became outraged when we discovered that Faust gets redeemed at the end, merely for striving. It still pisses me off, although I'm not sure why -- I'm usually not so sensitive about the sanctity of contracts.