1 Rich Rod is our shepherd; we shall not want.
2 He maketh us to lie to his wife: he leadeth us to his erection.
3 He bribeth our staff: he leadeth us to the path of visually enhanced underwear for his cock’s sake.
4 Yea, though we plead for jobs in other departments, we will get no response: for “Coach Rodriguez would be pissed.”
5 Our school preparest six million dollars for him to go away; yea, he will take the money and sue us for forty million more.
6 Surely his woman-beating players will follow us all the days of our life: and we will dwell in the house of The Rod for ever.
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UD thanks David and John.
Eve Sedgwick’s devoted brother, my old boyfriend and friend, died seven years ago at the age of 57.
The turn of the year decided me to go to the basement where, over a decade ago, he asked us to store boxes of his books, tapes, clothing, and papers. Time to deal with the books.
I’d already gone through the papers, and sent Eve’s letters and photographs on to her widower, Hal, in New York City; I’d already given David’s clothes to Goodwill. The tightly taped and roped boxes of books, however, daunted me – their physical and emotional weight sat in a dark corner, fit to burst.
Yesterday, out under a winter sky, the sun piercingly clear, I watched a red fox slip across our yard and take the small hill up to our neighbor’s, and this somehow sealed the deal: I’d go down with a sharp pair of scissors and cut the ropes and shelve the books.
**************************
Not everything was a book. There
was a colorful, wonderful, untouched
Indonesian journal, in which I’ll
write lecture notes for this
semester’s classes.
There were 36 Heroes of the
Blues cards.
David’s mother inscribed a copy
of Orwell’s writings to him.
A Straussian in his teens, David
held on to this 1967 pamphlet.
At the end of the copy of A Dialogue
on Love that his sister gave him, she writes:
It never seems sensible to pass along moral injunctions.
I sometimes think that beyond the Golden Rule,
the only one that matters is this:
If you can
be happy, you should.
An animal study that I wrote about in July, for instance, found that frail, elderly mice were capable of completing brief spurts of high-intensity running on little treadmills, if the treadmill’s pace were adjusted to each mouse’s individual fitness level.
… that great writing is mysterious and rare and always worth revisiting.
This is Jan Morris, fifty years ago, describing La Paz at night.
The scene is shadowy and cluttered, and you cannot always make out the detail as you push through the crowd; but the impression it leaves is one of ceaseless, tireless energy, a blur of strange faces and sinewy limbs, a haze of ill-understood intentions, a laugh from a small Mongol in dungarees, a sudden stink from an open drain, a cavalcade of tilted bowlers in the candlelight — and above it all, so clear, so close that you confuse the galaxies with the street lamps, the wide blue bowl of the Bolivian sky and the brilliant cloudless stars of the south.
“Since 1009 is a prime number, there are only four numbers that divide 2018: 1, 2, 1009, and 2018.”
The merry, the musical,
The jolly, the magical,
The feast, the feast of feasts, the festival
Suddenly ended
As the sky descended
But there was only the feeling,
In all the dark falling,
Of fragrance and of freshness, of birth and beginning.
