Things . . .

Things that I am concerned about today:

1. My sourdough rye bread, though excellent tasting, isn’t sour enough and so I went on-line to learn how to sour-up. Of course, that is revealing that I ended Passover a bit early. Maybe my sourdough starter is paying the price for my apostasy. When my children were growing up in Menomonie I baked all the bread, muffins, etc. in the house. I awoke every morning, wrote for a while and then prepared either scones, muffins, pancakes or waffles. I baked breads of all sorts, pizzas and calzones, and had all the equipment and implements of construction necessary to pretend to be a skilled baker. When I moved to an apartment and the children were no longer at home I gave up the practice and equipment, but with the past several months—even before COVID-19—I decided to return to baking—Now it appears the rest of the country has followed suit and I am having trouble getting yeast and white flours, and daily in the New York Times there are articles about baking bread, etc. 
2. It is April 14 and it has snowed too frequently over the past two weeks. Of course, the snow doesn’t last very long because the temperature has warmed the sidewalks. And so a 5”-6” snow on Sunday is gone by Tuesday, and so the current precipitation is merely Nature asserting its primacy. Since I have been in the Midwest (30 years) there has always been a heavy Spring snow, once a storm of 12” as late as May 5.
3. I was doing my yoga here this morning and I wondered what the protocol for practice is regarding farting. Of course, in a class with other people it would be a frowned upon practice, but here I am all by myself and I don’t really mind. But still . . .
4. My younger daughter turns 26 years old on Saturday. Her birthday has usually fallen during Passover and so she never had a party on her birthday. This year her birthday is post-Passover and she can’t even have a party. She will nevertheless turn 26 anyway. For her birthday she requested a subscription to the New York Review of Books. Score one for my influence.
5. John Prine’s death depressed me greatly. One thing it means is that my world has grown that much smaller. They have been featuring his music since his death on the radio programs to which I listen: his irony runs deep. I have enjoyed especially listening again to “Come Back to Us Barbara Lewis Hare Krishna Beauregard.” When I have heard contemporary music (99% of which I really don’t like or appreciate) I don’t hear the irony I love in Prine’s work. Dylan too writes with an ironic sense: from the very beginning and “John Birch Blues.” Slowly my generation is leaving. I remember when my mother died at the age of 90 years old there was nobody left to attend her funeral except us. Especially now I feel the isolation that results from the deaths all about. For years I have suffered the deaths of so many performers in the world of music in which I grew up: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, Jim Croce, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Tim Hardin, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, Elvis Presley, Tim Buckley . . . the list from those days is so long. These deaths always made me sad. But I was myself young, and the reality of mortality was not part of my thinking. Then the world continued to expand; music played a significant part in that expansion and it kept on coming. Now, mortality closes in on me, and the way of life that Prine represented—one suffused with irony, with sympathy, with humor and humility—has with his death become reduced. With his death I have lost yet another voice with which I grew up, a voice which sustained me despite the deaths of so many others.
6. I don’t own a scale. I used to use the professional one at the gym but it is now closed. I can’t imagine how heavy I am becoming. I have resisted bringing ice cream into the house but the quantity of bread, then matzah and macaroons and now bread and cookies again threatens to move me in the direction of 350 pounds. Not exactly accurate—but except for walks twice a day now and yoga I sit around and eat.
7. Rereading Camus’s The Plague. Depressing on so many levels, but the main one right now concerns how prescient Camus was concerning the various responses to plague. I have been disappointed in other books I have picked up: The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy; Normal People, Sally Rooney. I did start reading and am still reading Don Quixote which I am enjoying but it is so long and heavy. Not a book to take to bed. I purchased for some reason that eludes me now a novel by George Gissing, a name I probably recognized from my undergraduate days in Victorian literature class but whose work I have never read. I am getting desperate—but I do like 19^th century novels—really like Anthony Trollope despite his anti-Semitism. But who wasn’t and isn’t anti-Semitic?
8. Wanting to get to #10!
9. Wisconsin voters elected a Democrat to the Supreme Court in an upset victory. This portends well for November. Maybe people are getting angry at Republicans for their stupidities, their anti-democratic actions, their lies. Well, I can hope! And now people are getting angry at the shut down and the right wing organizes protest demonstrations. Dr. Rieux the narrator of The Plague says, “The evil that is in the world always come of ignorance . . . the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill . . .”  Enough said.
10. Finally, #10.