Slept poorly, got up several times, for good around 5:30. Read quota of Levine (African-American humor, a lot of it more disturbing/telling than funny by most lights), and a couple chapters of GHA (Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, which sounds like complete b.s., Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, and their respective relationships w/ the New Left and student radicals). Tried to sleep a little more. Opened our few presents w/ Bree and my parents around 10. Played Christmas songs at the piano for a while – don’t know if my dad noticed I was playing his “Our Little Christmas Tree.” Rested/dithered/showered. went out at 2:30 to the one Starbucks (on Mountain) that stayed open. Worked on the bit about added/omitted/recomposed bridges until the closed at 4:30. At home, finished GHA (Habermas—difficult to follow all the ins and outs on a second-hand account, but I get the outline of the view; hard not to feel that the idealization of café culture as a model for the public sphere is the positive mirror image of the nostalgia for a lost bourgeoisie that drove so much of Adorno’s negativity; then a concluding “continued relevance” chapter).

Leftovers w/ Bree and parents. Decided to sleep in extra bedroom for a few days, to keep Bree from catching my cold. Retired around 10, caught up in daybook, started Jack London’s Martin Eden (partly b/c it’s always been something my dad has mentioned, and he wrote a short one- or two- character musical about it in the ‘80s; additionally, I happened to bring it up w/ Aaron Kunin once and he said he liked the book). Put the Billy Hart quartet CD I got at Rhino on my iPad, fell asleep to it.