I love this movement.

Both Eileen and I are feeling a bit lazy today.

I have been meaning to complain about the New Yorker ad I keep hearing on podcasts in which David Remnick claims that the magazine has the best writing in the world. Really? Really? How’s your Russian? I mentally ask this guy every time I hear this obnoxious claim. Good grief! As though English and American English at that were the  only language in the world.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the New Yorker magazine and look forward to it dropping through my mail slot. But they are far from infallible or definitive as far as I’m concerned.

I figured out that I wasn’t confused about Herodotus being an earlier historian than Thucydides. I was confusing Herodotus with Suetonius. I thought I had misplaced my copies of Herodotus and Thucydides. But recently I was looking around and discovered my copy of The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. Oh. It was Suetonius I was thinking of not Herodotus. Suetonius is later than Thucydides and writes in Latin. So i was correctly placing him later and in Latin. I remember a lot of this stuff by visualizing the books I own. I don’t own a copy of Herodotus’s histories.

This morning sitting in the cool air, I read the following in Montaigne:

“It is not perhaps without good reason that we attribute to simplemindedness a readiness to believe anything and to ignorance the readiness to be convinced, for I think I was once taught that a belief is like an impression stamped on our soul: the softer and less resisting the soul, the easier it is to print anything on it.”

from the essay, “That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities”

Michel de Montaigne 1533-1592

The Far Right’s Manufactured Meaning of Critical Race Theory – FAIR

In it, he tells a story about Harold MacMillan and the De Gaulles.

They are meeting some time after the end of WWII. MacMillan says to Madame De Gaulle in his eloquent French, “Now that the war is over, Madame De Gaulle, what do you want out of the rest of your life?”

She replies equally charming, “I want a penis.”

MacMillan is understandably flustered. He notices Charles De Gaulle snickering.

De Gaulle leans over and confides to MacMillan that what Madame means is that she she wants “‘appiness.”

I admit that I love Uncle Meat by Zappa. I was listening to it this morning while exercising and I remembered that this was the album my parents forbid me to play at home since the woman speaking (Suzie Creamcheese) says “fuck” on it.

When I listen to it now I continue to be blown away by Zappa’s compositional prowess.

I’m probably just dating myself, but I think much of what he wrote continues to stand up fifty years later (or whatever it is).

I’m afraid I was grumpy to Eileen yesterday and I’m not proud of it. It makes me crazy. I find myself analyzing my bad behavior and coming up with only that I’m just too sensitive for my own good. No excuse, however.

Today, we hosted Eileen’s sisters, Mary and Nancy. We were supposed to go shop the sale at Teermans which is closing, but unfortunately it was closed on Wednesday.

We had a nice lunch at Cranes anyway.

I went to the Farmers Market this morning. I have been missing real tomatoes. I decided I wanted some heirlooms. There was only one stand which had them.

I bought them and some sunflowers.

I continue to think about and listen to Gore Vidal. I finished listening to the interview I embedded yesterday (at least all but the entire Q and A afterwards…). Vidal has sent me back to Montaigne, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Aristotle.

I liked what he said in the interview about Aristotle. He had been pretending to have read him all his life and decided to finally, actually read him.

I can relate to that.

I interlibrary loaned Klinenberg’s Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure can help fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life.

I read the introduction at the beach yesterday.

This Conversation Changed the Way I Interact With Technology Ezra Klein

The Questions Concerning TechnologyThe Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 11 L. M. Sacasas

This is the blog post that interested Klein.

The Convivial Society