1. I'm enjoying my return to reading. It took me a long time after I retired to read books again, but I think I'm getting close to where I want to be: I want to always have the reading of a book underway. Right now, I have two going, James Joyce's Dubliners and J. Anthony Lukas' Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years.
Shakespeare always portrays involvement in conspiracy, the breaking of law, devotion to immorality, and any plunge into ethical darkness as diminishing. Characters like Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, Richard III, Edmund, and others shrink before our eyes as their worlds become more confined, their perceptions and thoughts more and more polluted by paranoia, secrecy, and obsession.
I thought a lot about Shakespeare today as I read Nightmare. Otherwise intelligent and capable men like G. Gordon Liddy, Jeb Magruder, John Mitchell, and many others, including Richard Nixon himself, become so preoccupied with discrediting and undermining opponents, with piling up money, procured and spent in legitimate and decidedly illegitimate, illegal ways, and planning, carrying out, and covering up covert actions, that they have trouble thinking clearly, behaving rationally, or making sound decisions -- and, they squander the privilege of public service by rarely serving the public -- that is, governing -- and, instead, give much of their energy over to political scheming and their efforts to get away with breaking the law. The depth and breadth of these projects that took place in the shadows of the Nixon presidency is astonishing, as is Lukas' carefully researched book detailing it.
2. The Deke fixed a splendid dinner tonight of chopped chicken and onion fried together and served in a bowl with crispy roasted broccoli. Sweet chili sauce tasted great with this meal as did Frank's hot sauce.
3. After dinner, we dropped in at the Hill Street Depot for about an hour and talked about traveling to Oregon in mid-June, but we haven't quite figured out when we'll be where or how much time we'll spend away. It's all on the table and we'll get it figured out pretty soon. All we know for sure is that we will be in Eugene on June 15th for a party that will be both a celebration of three LCC English department faculty who are a retiring and a reunion of sorts for the department.
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