Summer Reading in South Philly

Summer time... hot. No A.C. (rhymes with A Sea) Not a complaint.

I listen to those reports--you know the ones. The "elderly" left alone in their elderly flats la la la.. I Keep a box fan going on my mostly naked body, take showers, drink plenty of water, juice, seltzer...and into the evening, refreshments more conducive to sleep.

And I read.

I may be seized tomorrow by the G.M. (rhymes with Dim Bleeper) in any one of his guises--but it won't be on account of my inability to remember how to avoid heat stroke. I'm only 67--three years before I have to bid adieu to youth and compulsively wrap myself in scarves and overcoats no matter the season.

Summer readings: tonight, finished The Europeans, which I enjoyed immensely. Sometimes it helps to find where and what we are by giving ourselves freely to what was, and what we are not and never will be again. Oh yeah, first Vol. The Man Without Qualities, Flaubert's Sentimental Education (in English), Makine's Music of Life, Tournier's The Ogre.

Have begun a new piece of short fiction... suggested when I noticed a clerk at our Pennsylvania Communist State Liquor Store-she had a JW ( rhymes with Recovia's Blitzness) flier off to the side... pastel Peaceable Kingdom. A delicious fantasy as I biked home, of how/why someone given to a pledge of abstinence to every imaginable and unimaginable earthly pleasure (my god, how do these people procreate?... without joy? ... the only explanation for Republicans... but JW's don't even vote! ) would find herself vending booze to the Great Unsaved...

Opened Gombrowitz', Ferdydurke tonight. Reading a neat but full of missing links record of web postings from a Poetics List-Serve, compiled by Joel Kuszai--the missing links being the stuff these comments are referring to. Trying to catch up on months of New Yorkers, London Review of Books. Reading Al Ferber's wonderful L'Strange Cafe--me, a connoisseur of neighborhood bars, loving this one. Paul Auster's selected poems in Disappearances... impressive. Several books of poetry by Donald Finkel: The Detachable Man, What Manner of Beast: Adequate Earth: God Hunger, by Michael Ryan, Donna Cartelli's Black Mayonnaise-- (all books bought at Molly's). Continue to improve my reading-French with Fin de partie.

Really enjoyed the Last Reading at Molly's... Ish Klein is awesome.
Summer is good. Social Security makes it even better...

South Philly is great... but I do miss the ocean