Futile Horn

01.29.2005 - 1:56 pm (I feel like eroded gentry)

Whoever left me alone in this house with a couple of cats is going to have hell to pay. Man I should have just gone out drinking last night.

Maegan and I were going to set up two blogs, one of me in pictures with things I have an irrational hatred for, and another with things that make inexplicably happy. We missed the opportunity to shoot me standing under the sign giving the current temperature at –15 degrees, but I could have frozen my nuts off posing, and there’s really nothing irrational about being pissed off about that.

I don’t mind Minnesota, but not much happens here worth writing home about. I mean, the apartment needs a few repairs and I think we’ve mice or maybe raccoons the size of bears living in the attic, but you don’t really want to hear about the prodigious pile of laundry that needs to be folded, do you?

I guess I am a little more than half way through Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk, and I’m really very pleased. I usually don’t consider myself the sort interested in family novels (novel about families, not for families), but complexity and control of the characters is impressive. Usually when you’ve got something like six main characters, I tend to feel one or more have been neglected and I kinda wish the author would hurry up and kill them off to tighten up the story, but this really works well. I know this is sort of a negative praise, but hey, for me to say there’s nothing I really don’t like, that’s gushing.

I’ve also started reading book I of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum. I like reading Cicero because his Latin is somehow comforting, there’re always bits of history floating in there you feel you should know, every now and again he drops a sentence on you want to frame (even if you aren’t the framing sort), and he likes to explicitly remind people like me what a great thing an education in the humanities is. Sometimes I forget.

The motto for the University of Minnesota seems to be a paraphrase of Cicero. But I’ve been thinking about this a bit. Whereas I think Cicero is clear enough, the paraphrase might suggest something else. C. says something like “all arts which pertain to liberal education have a certain common chain and are held together by almost a blood relationship,” granted a little bit of a mixed metaphor, you get the idea. But even though I immediately understood what idea it was trying to get across, I suppose the motto, using the same words but having no context, could mean something like “one fetter for all arts,” which you’ve got to admit is a different thing.

I get to sit around and write revisions today. I don’t really need to do this, but it will help me pass the time as I try to see how many cups of peach tea I can consume in a day.

I gave up on that whole God thing a long time ago, but if I were inclined to pray for anything at all, I’d pray for the elections. That shit is so scary I get queasy thinking about it all the way over here.

Anyway, I’ve wasted enough time with this now. Ciao.

Born to play the funky céilí,
Futile Horn