12.24.17

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.

12.24.17

Up and down a few times. Had some words w/ overnight caregiver, a relatively new one on the rotation, who had fallen asleep in the living room while she was supposed to be watching my mom (my dad can’t sleep if he doesn’t feel she’s in good hands). I was justified, but I feel bad about losing my cool. Up for good around 5, read maybe 3 ch. GHA: the Institute is back in Germany, Habermas is completely disillusioned with Heidegger, etc. Went to the Spot about 8:30, cleaned up/shortened yesterday’s work for a bit, started attaching some “exceptions” to the earlier working def. of the bridge.

Home at noon, found out that Liz, our most reliable caregiver who was going to help was Xmas dinner, called out w/ a migraine. Got the prime rib in the over around 2, put together a dish of scalloped potatoes, cleaned green beans, put a leaf in the dining room table. The sub, named Beverly, came at 3; a quiet but competent woman from New Orleans, apparently a retired/ing teacher’s asst. who does this on the weekends. Read to 300 in Levine – he says some annoying things about [white] pop songs. Not that bad, but S.I. Hayakawa is an authority? Rest of evening devoted to Xmas dinner/visit with Mom, Dad, their siblings, and Bree – arrived around 5, left around 8:30. Exhausted from the work/stress/cold. In bed by 10, read through the rest of that issue of Poetry – intrigued by Farnoosh Fathi, annoyed by Jameson Fitzpatrick (a poem too literally about “wokeness”), enjoyed some of Matthew Sweeney’s petit poeme en prose, esp. “The Bottle Gatherer.” Lights out.

12.23.17

Up at 5, but felt pretty caught up on sleep. 50 p. Levine (he’s getting into secular/popular music, and so into material I already have knowledgable opinions about; view of “vaudeville” v. “country”/solo blues is standard; he’s already make the mistake of thinking that Ervin Drake’s “No Segregation in Heaven” was in any sense a genuine gospel song.); 2 ½ ch. GHA (up through Benjamin’s artwork essay and Adorno on jazz, into Nazism.) Should record a couple of striking passages:

“Thomas Mann’s schema of German bourgeois familiar development in Buddenbrooks—the first generation makes the money, the second cements the family’s social position, and the third withdraws into something like aesthetic malaise—was unwittingly subverted by these Frankfurt scholars. (ch. 2 – the e-book pagination isn’t useful; I identify w/ this vis-à-vis my own [Italian-American] family.)

“Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built and a textile one when it is woven.” (Quoted from Benjamin, One-Way Street; but what about work on good music?)

“Before his untimely death aged sixty-three in 1945, [logical positivist Otto] Neurath would establish the Isotype Institute in Oxford, devoted to his symbolic way of representing quantitative information which he was to deploy to help with slum clearance planning the West Midlands. That was one of the rare moments, with all due respect to the philosophical discipline, in which a logician’s skills have helped improve the living conditions of those suffering under capitalism” (ch. 9; this relates to my Quine/”On What There Is”/slum metaphor project, if I ever get to it. The second sentence is just annoying; compared to whose skills, Adorno’s?)

Went out for a coffee at Rad in downtown Upland, sent regrets for Chris & Cleaver’s holiday party (neither mom’s condition nor my own makes me feel like driving to Fullerton). Groceries. Home at 11, napped, knocked off some very mundane tasks, on the order of putting new insurance cards in both cards (and, just as importantly, informing Dad I did so). Read a little ahead in Levine, watched Camperforce, a 15-min doc on RV owners who work seasonally for Amazon (related to acquaintance Jessica Bruder’s book Nomadland).

Went back out and worked 3-6 at the Spot. Went pretty damn well – worked up my comments on the “race” of the bridge, and some polemic against Middleton. 3-4 substantial grafs, about 1000 words. Dinner at home, nothing worth remaking after. Read ahead a bit in Levine, in case I can’t tomorrow. Cold symptoms on and off through day, sent me to bed early, maybe 10, w/ a Whistler movie on.

12.22.17

Up about 4; read, tried to go back to bed at 6:30. My mother had a fall by the washing machine just before 7; the caregiver got me up. We were at the ER from 8:30 utnil around 5 pm. Omitting the blow-by-blow, but she has a small fracture in her right femur, not all the way through the bone; is supposed to heal, required physical therapy rather than surgery. In the meantime, it left her somewhat disoriented and we are helping her move (to bed, bathroom). Saw the Christmas short w/ J. Carrol Naish on TCM after we were settled back at home, and the first part of Meet Me In St. Louis – I don’t think I could stand watching Margaret O’Brien die tonight.

Sleep deprived, w/o usual nap; went to bed around 10 w/ a Thin Man movie playing on my laptop. Have to admit I’ve had a cold developing the last 2-3 days. No writing (or time alone, period). Managed to read, mostly at the hospital, 50 p. Levine, 3 ch. GHA (Naples, Mahagonny, Horkeimer/Fromm), and a few poets in Poetry – I’ll admit begrudgingly that Andrew Motion has a few good lines. Scrawled something in the daybook.

Extremely difficult day.

12.21.17

Up 4:30; read about 30 p. Levine (trickster tales). Went out to the Spot (an otherok coffee place on Mountain Avenue), worked from 7:30-11. A little balled up about how much to say about folk revivalism at this point; wrote something I may cut, started looking at an important graf on race. Picked up some things from Smart & Final, nearby. Came home, read a ch. of GHA (on the Institute for Social Research as originally housed in Frankfurt; informative), napped until 1:30. Left w/ Bree for family Xmas shopping at Kohl’s, Target, Trader Joe’s; bought myself a planner an a small notebook in the odd Japanese notions store next to the latter. Finished the Jepsen CD, which mainly gave the impression of syntactic well-formedness. Tried to buy sausage for dinner at Claro’s, but the line for the deli counter was ridiculous (they were on 99 when I took number 16). Dropped Bree at home and went back out to Sprouts to reserve a prime rib (choice, actually) for Xmas Eve dinner, took time for myself to go to the Goodwill on Foothill (found a Cage/Harrison/Partch CD, virtually the only one of any interest unless I decide I need to explore Alan Jackson and Vince Gill), Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (speaking of grammaticality), and an r&b piano instruction book (not sure of the vintage, but not recent). Drove through El Pollo Loco to pick up dinner for parents; back 5:45. Changed, and went w/ Bree to the Fox Theater in Pomona for Kyle and Annalee’s kids’ school’s Holiday Sing. Poked my head into the local artists’ shop next door after parking the car, almost bought a book on Levinas from a table outside, maybe the last remains of the amazing used stock they had a year ago. Some questionable choreography, a rewrite of Taio Cruz’ “Dynamite” (“Candlelight”) and something called “Santa’s Getting Fit.” Clear highlight, a rather sweetly harmonized Hannukah song called “One Candle.” Wrote my daybook poem during a Kwanzaa number. Had a bite with K&A + their kids at El Merendero across the street. Disc One of Ellington ended on the way home, put on Independent Music for Independent Coffee Drinkers, Volume One, a comp I’d picked up somewhere b/c it had 2 songs by Pete Galub’s friend Django Haskins (as The Old Ceremony), at least one of which, “Poison Pen,” is strong. Most of the rest is NPR wannabie singer-songwriter stuff, some good playing. Home before 10, read Levine until Bree wanted to turn out the light, 11.