Illness; my mom’s birthday; libraries; Norman Podhoretz; Napoleon; the famous Danish book about traveling to Yemen
Jasper is over his gingivitis (but not the disease that caused it). He’s also past the sneezing and eye-running that plagued him last week. Now Ziva has both of those ailments. To my knowledge, this is her first illness.
Yesterday, she huddled miserably in remote corners of the apartment. Tonight, she’s more active – but no less afflicted.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My mom’s birthday was today. I gave her some leftover pork that Karin cooked awhile ago. Then my mom asked for the recipe, and so I typed it up on LaTeX and sent it to her as a PDF.
Later, we held a supper for my mom, and Mary asked: “Mother, how does it feel to have all your children with you?” (In fact, David wasn’t there.) After the supper, we had a dessert, and after the dessert, Karin & I went to Walmart to buy medicine for the kitties.
It appears that Walmart sells The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory:
“Only 1 left!”
Even reduced by thirty dollars, the price isn’t nearly in reach. Nor does the Indiana University library system own a printed copy of the book. Nor can the e-book be accessed at my campus.
This leaves Interlibrary Loan. Thankfully, ILL is a marvel, a privilege that exceeds what any person could deserve, a manifestation of the grace of God and Caesar.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’m also using the library system to haul in old copies of three books recently re-released by NYRB. The first is Making It by Norman Podhoretz. A comprehensive review by Louis Menand is here.
The book itself is naturally witty, but also incorrigibly grasping. However, the author faces up to this problem rather well:
Still to come from the library: The Death of Napoleon, a short novel by Simon Leys, whose essays collected in The Hall of Uselessness are elegant, empathetic, and astute; and Thorkild Hansen’s Arabia Felix, about an eighteenth-century expedition of Danes to what is now Yemen. The Danes did not get on with one another. I hope to read about the details at this year’s church camp, to which, on Thursday, Karin & I will travel.
Yesterday, she huddled miserably in remote corners of the apartment. Tonight, she’s more active – but no less afflicted.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My mom’s birthday was today. I gave her some leftover pork that Karin cooked awhile ago. Then my mom asked for the recipe, and so I typed it up on LaTeX and sent it to her as a PDF.
Later, we held a supper for my mom, and Mary asked: “Mother, how does it feel to have all your children with you?” (In fact, David wasn’t there.) After the supper, we had a dessert, and after the dessert, Karin & I went to Walmart to buy medicine for the kitties.
It appears that Walmart sells The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory:
“Only 1 left!”
Even reduced by thirty dollars, the price isn’t nearly in reach. Nor does the Indiana University library system own a printed copy of the book. Nor can the e-book be accessed at my campus.
This leaves Interlibrary Loan. Thankfully, ILL is a marvel, a privilege that exceeds what any person could deserve, a manifestation of the grace of God and Caesar.
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
I’m also using the library system to haul in old copies of three books recently re-released by NYRB. The first is Making It by Norman Podhoretz. A comprehensive review by Louis Menand is here.
The book itself is naturally witty, but also incorrigibly grasping. However, the author faces up to this problem rather well:
A critic with a very good pair of ears once wrote that he could hear in some of my essays “the tones of a young man who expects others to be just a little too pleased with his early eminence.”Indeed. Podhoretz also observes shrewdly the guiding myths of Brooklyn Judaism, of the universities of Columbia and Cambridge (England), and – I haven’t quite got to it yet – of the New York magazine scene.
Still to come from the library: The Death of Napoleon, a short novel by Simon Leys, whose essays collected in The Hall of Uselessness are elegant, empathetic, and astute; and Thorkild Hansen’s Arabia Felix, about an eighteenth-century expedition of Danes to what is now Yemen. The Danes did not get on with one another. I hope to read about the details at this year’s church camp, to which, on Thursday, Karin & I will travel.