last day state side

Savannah made it safely home as I thought she would. It was a lot of fun having her around. I wish I saw my family more often but what can you do?

Eileen is at the masseuse. She threw her back out last week and has been suffering. This is her second trip to the masseuse and she was quite hopeful this would ease her pain.

Today is the day we do all our last minute preparations to get on a plane for Ireland tomorrow. As usual I am struggling to decide what actual books to take with me. Eileen pointed out that it would be harder to sit in the backyard and read books on a tablet than using the real thing. She is playing to my increasing bias to reading actual books instead of ebooks.

I want to travel light on this trip. Unfortunately there don’t seem to be ebook versions of the F. Jackson Knight translation of Virgil’s Aeneid not the Carlyle-Wicksteed translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Both of these books are my daily morning reading after working on Greek. They aren’t really pleasure reading which is something I would like to do on this trip.

I discovered this morning that the title of Thomas A. Sebeok’s I Think I Am A Verb: More Contributions to The Doctrine of Signs is taken from a quote from Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was dieing of throat cancer and had ceased to be able to speak easily. Some days before his death he wrote this:

“I do not sleep though sometimes I doze a little. If up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; or to suffer. I signify all three.”

What a very cool quote. And get a load of those semi-colons. Not just oxford commas but good old starchy 19th century American semi-colons.

Sebeok died in 2001 but he authored many books. I love his ideas and writing style. I might have to take this book with me.

I own the hardback, but I didn’t pay that much for it. I’m sure it was an impulse item I purchased browsing a store or a sale. 70 bucks for the kindle version is prohibitive.

While browsing on Amazon I discovered a couple of interesting books that Sebeok co-authored.

These will have to go on my list of books to check out in the future.

Two books about Northern Irish Troubles win Orwell prize

I was thinking of rereading Joyce on my trip to Ireland. But this article points out two recent delicious books on “the troubles.” What better way to spend my time in Ireland and England than reading these two?

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