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.

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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.

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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.

Writing, packing, babysitting

This Easter has been the Easter of church nursery duty. I didn’t get to hear any sermons. I didn’t get to tour the Stations of the Cross (not even the ones erected in my church’s sanctuary). I did get to hold some tiny babies.

It’s also been the Easter of packing books – into egg boxes, which is fitting. In two weeks, we’ll’ve moved into our new home.

What to do with the furniture? The couches, we’ll keep for now. The kitties have shredded them. They would shred any new couch.

Karin owns a heavy cedar chest. She just tried, with all her might, to raise its lid. Jasper took this as an invitation to jump onto the lid. Jasper involves himself in all our packing.

Ziva, though, is frightened by the packing. She hides under our bedcovers.

Now to abruptly change the subject: Recently, it’s become possible to use these Roman, Italic, and Bold fonts in Google Docs:

Bookman Old Style
Century Schoolbook
*Palatino Linotype
*Times (not Times New Roman)
Twentieth Century

(* denotes the availability of standard ligatures)

This makes Google Docs a better choice for writing papers. If I were to do grad school all over again, I’d use Google Docs, not LaTeX. LaTeX is a powerful free typesetting system, but the process of writing in code and compiling PDFs over a slow Web connection has swallowed up who knows how many of my most vigorous years.

February fragments

Last week I was sick. This week I feel better, but I’m still blowing my nose a lot. We’re out of tissues and I’ve switched to napkins (which, oddly, I prefer). I’ve gone running just twice — barely enough to keep limber. With sickness comes sadness, and sadness weakens my resolve to trudge through snow.

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At IUSB I tutored a professor. (He was from China; he needed help writing in English.) He was submitting an article for publication. The draft had been typeset with LaTeX, which made me nostalgic for graduate school.

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I’m conflicted about Libre Baskerville. On the one hand, well, it’s a Baskerville (or a Baskerville clone), and it has boldface and italics, and it’s free. I printed out a sample and it looked OK. I liked the tall x-height. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure the font was designed for webpages, not for print, and I don’t wish to be caught printing out the wrong kind of font.

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With Kenny I’ve been achieving domestic bliss: we’ve just finished watching Season 2 of Downton Abbey. But this weekend he’s in Nicaragua. With whom shall I watch TV? With Sabby, that’s whom. Five hours of Pride and Prejudice.

With David, two weeks ago, I watched Two English Girls. All we knew of it was its Hulu Plus synopsis: “A romantic triangle develops between two English girls and a Frenchman.” That seemed very promising to us. The movie fulfilled that promise.

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On the bus, an old lady asked to listen to my music, and so I lent her an earbud. She listened to “Cups” from Beaucoup Fish. She said it was the bomb.