About the Morning Read
Big Daddy’s, the newest neighborhood eatery, on Second at 83rd. It is almost as retro as the diner in Pleasantville — clientele included! The sound system, however, played “Love Shack,” by the B-52s. It’s really a very B-52s kind of place.
Yesterday, I just jumped in and filed the first “Morning Read” entry, without any explanations. I relied, somewhat lazily, on the snapshot of the stack of books to provide an idea of what the text referred to. It might not be readily evident that I have been reading bits of these books every morning for several months now. Well, most weekday mornings. The rubric is: a story from the Decameron; one hundred lines of the Aeneid; two poems by C K Williams, from the recent Collected Poems; one essay from Clive James’s Cultural Amnesia; a year’s worth of letters from The Mitfords; and one chapter each from Stendhal’s’ Le rouge et le noir and from Blogging Heroes. I would never make it through most of these books without a plan.
During the holidays, I neglected the morning read routine — but not The Mitfords. With less than twenty years to read through, I’ll be done with the collection of the six sisters’ letters in a week or two. (I’m down to four sisters. It’s quite noticeable that, no sooner did Nancy die, in 1973, than all sorts of skirmishes broke out between Decca (Jessica) on the others. The infamous scrapbook war, launched when Pamela “asked” Decca if she had “borrowed” a massive album from Chatsworth — Decca saw right away that she was being charged with theft — got fairly acrimonious. Amusingly… but enough of this.)
There will be no Morning Read this morning, because I have to go to the movies. I have to go to the movies today because I can’t go tomorrow. I can’t go tomorrow because I’m scheduled for a Remicade infusion early in the afternoon. “Then what have I?”