I had to send two C. P. E. Bach books back to the libraries that sent them to me via interlibrary loan. Before leaving to do so I did another request for each one and will soon have them again in my greedy little hands. I finished reading Anthony and Cleopatra by Shakespeare this morning. Great stuff! I also started reading Stand On Zanzibar by John Brunner. I was chatting with Jeremy about this author the other day. I was surprised that I didn’t have any books by him in my library. But now I do. I had to go look up the year in which Burgess published Clockwork Orange. The syntax in the books are related. Burgess mixes up Russian and English to come up with pidgin language Alex and his cronies use. Brunner coins words that mix up English and Corporate language. Burgess (1962) turns out to predate Brunner (1968). Both men are writing under the spell of Joyce.

We had a good Christmas. Jeremy, Elizabeth, and Alex came for Christmas eve and left the next day. I enjoy having them around. I even did a bit of cooking even though Eileen and I swore we were going to make easy eating with salads and cheeses from Meijer.

The above picture is of the New York Times recipe for Creamed Greens Potpie. It uses store bought puff pastry. I modified it and used a Spanakopita filling of Spinach and Feta cheese. I thought it was great but Eileen said it was too garlicky and tasted too much of spinach.

We are descending (with permission) on my poor brother and his wife in a few days. Now that Edison has gone to his reward (died), we are freer to leave the house. We are all severely vaccinated so it should be relatively safe.

I’m planning to use the remaining puff pastry in some kind of Cheese Pinwheel thingo. Something along these lines bur probably not quite as fancy.

I also promised Mark I would bring fresh baked bread. We will take whatever is left from Christmas meals as well.

I have been enjoying the hell out of Susan Howe’s The Birth-Mark.

It’s a unique blend of scholarship and poetry and what not. The title comes from a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne of the same name. My edition does not have a hyphen in it. But thinking about the different versions of published works is very much what Howe is about.

She is also into marginalia. As she writes her prose she will point out what Melville wrote in the margins of his copy of a Hawthorne work. Since she is into marginalia she is attuned to the silencing of great women writers like Emily Dickinson. I am digging all the American crap. The whole discussion is something I resonate with.

Here are some cool quotes from Howe’s book.

“The enthusiast … is a solitary who lives in a world of his own peopling.” Coleridge quoted in Howe

In describing archived presentation of original documents, Howe quotes Richard Sieburth’s introduction to his translation of Hymns and Fragments by Friedrich Hölderlin: “[P]resenting Hölderlin’s texts as events rather than objects, as processes rather than products, [converts] the reader from passive consumer into active participant in the genesis of the poem, while at the same time calling attention to the fundamentally historical character of both the reader’s and the writer’s activity.”

I dig that sort of stuff. This relates a bit to the way I see music as a verb about group process.

I learned a new word today: “cormorant.”

Eileen recognized it as the name of a bird but in her book The Birth-mark, that I started today, Susan Howe uses the word in reference to John Cotton, the historian Cotton Mather’s maternal grandfather calling him a “library cormorant.” The OED gives a second figurative meaning of cormorant as “An insatiably greedy or rapacious person. Also with qualification, as money-cormorant.” Howe says that John Cotton was one of the “vivid” lives in the “Lives of Sixty Famous Divines,” in Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana.

Not only was John Cotton a “library cormorant” but “Mr. Cotton was indeed a most universal scholar, and a living system of the liberal arts, and a walking library…. Twelve hours in a day he commonly studied, and would call that a scholar’s day; resolving to wear out with using than with rusting.” (from the Magnalia as quoted by Howe)

I like the idea of wearing out from use rather than rust. I think this is something I aspire to as well and reminds me of Eileen and her Mom.

Later Howe refers to Nathaniel Hawthorne as a “library cormorant.” I think this is a useful word for me since I and so m any others I know are library cormorants.

I picked up on Howe because she gave a joint reading with Ben Lerner which is on YouTube. I was just curious about her work. She’s a bit older than Lerner (b. 1937). I’m not sure what the book is about yet but decided I was interested because it deals with Emily Dickinson, Emerson, and others.

I’m on the road to recovery from being phished thanks especially the expertise of my daughter, Sarah, and brother, Mark. I upgraded my Internet Security software and ran some diagnostics. I changed a few passwords and will be working on that more. Eileen and I both have some work to do on securing our devices. Now we have motivation!

Eileen is working on her Mom’s famous cinnamon rolls today. They look great so far. I have volunteered to eat any failures if she is not satisfied and starts over.

Rhonda just stopped by with a Christmas gift. I was not only able to give her her Christmas gift but these days I can give a whirlwind tour of my study, my music room, and Eileen’s loom room. As Eileen just remarked, we are getting somewhere!

I made one last trip to Readers World before Christmas Day today. I did some research on some books for Eileen and me and then went and picked out some stuff. Eileen always finds it difficult to choose something to give me. Usually if we’re alone for Christmas we don’t really do much, but since we will be celebrating here on Christmas day and have lots of presents for Elizabeth, Jeremy and Alex it seems that Santa should bring both Eileen and me stuff. So I did the Santa thing for both of us today. I think I was pretty successful.

Eileen also is making chili today, one pot vegetarian and one pot carnivore. The house is smelling excellent!