ada_hoffmann

For nearly the first time since the Cape, I slept. It required me to spend hours after midnight waiting for my body to get the unconsciousness memo and then repeat the process this morning after a doctor's office called back at the crack of business, but construction has been precluded by the recurrent nor'easter rain and it worked. The dreams were nothing to write home about, but at least I had them. And then we had a mild power outage, but still. Sleep! I could get used to it.

The construction turned out not to be on an adjacent street; we were misled by it not being roadwork. It is the re-roofing of a house diagonally across our street and we have no idea how many days it will last except two is already more than enough. I can't believe we are still afflicted with construction, it just changed levels. I wanted to do anything with my brain this evening and fell asleep instead. On the bright side, it occurred to me to look into the current whereabouts of the members of my beloved Schmekel, the short-lived and brilliant, all-trans, all-Jewish klezmer-punk band that gave the world such gems as "I'll Be Your Maccabee" (2010)" and "I'm Sorry, It's Yom Kippur" (2011) and discovered that while the keyboardist has remained a musician, the bassist went into the medical profession, the guitarist became an award-winning game designer, and as of last year the drummer is the rabbi of a congregation in western Massachusetts, which is great. Any mention of Martin Buber will to this day instantly earworm me with "FTM at the DMV" (2013).

This morning was marked by construction on a loudly adjacent street, a constant window-juddering for hours from which I finally managed to fall asleep just in time to wake up for my doctor's apppointment. The amount of sleep on which I have run this last week is not sufficient to sustain intelligence. This meme I stole from foxmoth might still have required thought to complete: the seven deadly sins of reading.

1. Lust, books I want to read for their cover.

None at the moment, but the mysterious attractiveness of cover art has in the past memorably led me to check out P. C. Hodgell's God Stalk (1982), Larry Niven's The Integral Trees (1984), and Tanith Lee's The Book of the Damned (1988).

2. Pride, challenging books I've finished.

In terms of personal time put in, Alasdair Gray's Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), Robert Serber's The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb (1992), and Yiannis (Anastasios Ioannis) Metaxas' Μετά όμως, μετά . . . (2017).

3. Gluttony, books I've read more than once.

I don't even keep track! Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), Mary Renault's The Mask of Apollo (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin's The Complete Orsinia (2016).

4. Sloth, books on my to-read list the longest.

I don't keep a to-read list. I have failed to get around to whole chunks of the Western canon in English.

5. Greed, books I own multiple editions of.

Not counting books that had to be re-bought specifically because their original editions were perishing through use, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (1967), Patricia A. McKillip's Riddle-Master (1976–79), and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast (1946–59).

6. Wrath, books I despised.

Books I disliked seem to slip from my mind more easily than the other kind, but I bounced definitely off Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948), Alan Moore's Watchmen (1987), and A. S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009).

7. Envy, books I want to live in.

I do not want to live in most of the books I read for a variety of reasons, but from elementary through high school the answer would have been hands-down, one-way, Anne McCaffrey's Pern. These days I would take a study abroad in Greer Gilman's Cloud. Lloyd Alexander's Prydain remains the site of my sole official, never-written self-insert.

Appropriately enough to wind up a book meme, I have just been given two poetry collections in modern Greek by the friend of the family who has the olive groves outside Sparti. I remain amateur in the language and the Nikos Kavvadias looks incredibly maritime.

In fairness to June Lockhart, the first time I ever saw her she was sharing the same episode of Babylon 5 (1994–98) as Londo's card-sharping tentadicks and the latter seared themselves rather more indelibly into my brain, but with less than five minutes of her own in T-Men (1947) she stole far more of the film for me, so much that even knowing that a century is a graceful point to depart from, I am still sorry the world no longer contains her and all of her time. She moved from film to television so early that I always wondered if she had been blacklisted like Marsha Hunt, but the answer looks like not. I loved finding out about her tastes in rock music and my experience of her most famous and long-running roles was almost nil. It means I remember her, perhaps unfairly, twenty-two years old and looking like the fair-haired avatar of all the white picket fences in the world, coming effortlessly up to speed on their shadows. She should have worked with David Lynch.