January 13, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri

Back to the Coffee Break – during cold weather I am not very venturesome (and sometimes I feel that I have lost my wanderlust). But no I did get a reservation made to ride the train  to Chicago next week and I sent off a confusing e-mail and someone was waiting at the  station for me yesterday evening. Im sorry for the confusion I said on the phone and instead of the 19th I had written the 11th which would have been the day before. "It was no trouble," Jerry replied, "the station is only five minutes away and I stayed in the car." But still I felt like an ass. Read your e-mails before hitting send – better yet save them as drafts and review them later and only then send – there is something about time that erases all those things that you just assume and what you see is what is there rather than what you had intented. So asshole save it and review it next time.

Picked up two Interlibrary Loan books at the branch library yesterday – B H Fairchild – Local Knowledge and  Morris Kline – Mathematics – the loss of certainty. I'll have to read them before Monday – set aside the other fourteen books and concentrate on them but Im almost finished with Walter Mosley and Fred Vargas. And there should be time for The Collected Poems of A E Houman and Dixon – The Psychology of Military Incometence. I'll probably also finish Lakoff – The Political Mind. I brought all but Mosely and Vargas with me to the coffee shop – mystery is my wintertime bedtime reading. Everything changes during the winter it seems.

You mentioned fourteen books and that is only seven - wlll then there is also – The Life of Johnson by Boswell – the Collected Poems of Antonio Machado – Fallen into the Pit by Ellis Peters – the poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, a book on Cleopatra and one claiming that George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh were writing on the same thing.





I'm trying to learn Spanish by translating Machado - poetry is best for language learning because the facing translation only gives you a sense of what it means and it leaves it to you to figure out how words that you translate got to mean what is written on the opposite page - in other words it prohibits a one-to-one literal transference

First to be lain bare
Are the tops of the trees
Then the underbrush
Which soaks up every drop
Of newly available sun
Hangs on for its life
Meanwhile the green grass
Is hidden under litter
And later it will be the snow

Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the cameraa records it. But this is the opposite of understanding which starts with not accepting the world as it looks – Susan Sontag