1. As the 20th century got underway, James Joyce wrote a series of short stories. I guess you could call them profiles. The stories are about different everyday boys and girls and men and women in Dublin. The stories are each tightly focused on a single event: two boys skip school, a boy longs to please a girl by buying her a gift a bazaar, a woman wants to run away from Dublin to Buenos Aires with her lover, a priest dies, a woman wants to marry off her daughter, and more. Each of these ordinary events carries emotional and psychological weight and importance and each embodies Joyce's view of the spiritual conditions in Dublin. I read more of these stories today, slowly, often stopping, going back, rereading, absorbing details, experiencing the emotional conflict of each story, trying to take in what each character comes to learn about the world. Dubliners is a slim volume, but it's going to take me several days to finish. I enjoy that the stories are enigmatic.
On Monday night, I dreamed my own versions of Dubliner tales and at two in the morning I was wide awake for an hour and a half settling my mind down. I was that invigorated and disturbed.
2. Today I published over at kelloggbloggin' my first installation of conversations with Jack Silverton. Jack overheard Cas and me talking about books and he had a story about a guy he struck up a conversation with years ago in the Kopper Keg who was driving around the USA with his dog and reflected on some reading he's done. If you'd like to read what Jack had to say, just click here.
3. Shawn and the guys working for him were all back today and worked hard here at our house and over at Christy's. The Deke asked Shawn, when their shift was over, if he wanted to try some of the beer Josh sent us. Shawn did.
To start, Shawn chose an Imperial Coffee Porter from Hitchhiking Brewing in Pittsburgh, PA called Double Shakes. I think I've enjoyed every beer I've ever had from Pennsylvania and this powerhouse porter augmented the list for me. I love imperial porters and stouts, whether they feature flavors of chocolate, coffee, oysters, oak barrels where bourbon, rum, or whiskey was once stored, vanilla, molasses, or other delights. I love drinking imperial stouts and porters in small pours, so imbibing five ounces of this mellow, coffee and chocolate rich beer was perfect.
I chose our next beer and I wanted to try the last of our hazy Imperial IPAs. I reached for another beer from Magnify Brewing in Fairfield, NJ called Peak of Righteousness and it performed beautifully. I can't really breakdown the multiple tastes of this beer, but I can say that the words that kept running through my mind were "juicy" "goodness" and "thank God for hazy 2IPAs".
As I prepared our grilled romaine lettuce and baked pork chops dinner, chops which had soaked this afternoon in buttermilk and which I coated with a almond flour, corn starch, Parmesan cheese, Italian seasoning, salt, and garlic powder, the Deke and I shared a pint of another beer from Old Nation Brewing in Willamston, MI. It's another offering from their New Orthodoxy Series called Cart Horse IPA. I enjoyed it, but I didn't give the experience of drinking it my full attention. My mind was on the pork chops and the grilled lettuce I was preparing. I still had about five ounces left to drink as we started to eat dinner and I didn't touch it while we ate. Instead, I finished eating, took my little glass of beer into the living room, and took about twenty minutes to finish it off.
Again, my attention was not fully focused on the beer, especially when Christy came over and shared her joy that Riley had been a doggy angel at his first dog training class in Hayden. It was great to hear he had behaved so well. Christy was mightily happy and relieved.
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