1. For many, many years in my life, when I read books, say, by Charles Dickens, my mind was always working not only on enjoying the book, but also on what I would write a paper on about that book or how I would present it to students in class. When I retired, I started doing all I could to read books non-professionally, without thinking about writing papers or how I would include the book in a syllabus.
I spent several hours today reading Dickens' Bleak House. I'm not very far into the novel, but already Dickens has introduced me to memorable descriptions of London, a handful of eccentric and indelible characters (with, by the way, the tastiest names: Mr. Krook, Lady Dedlock, Mrs. Jellyby, Harold Skimpole, Guppy, and others), and moments rich in both injustice and sentimentality as the progress of Esther Summerson's story gets underway. I'm reading the book slowly. I'm not preparing it. I don't have a deadline. I'm not under the influence of the professional demands that so much of my reading was under for much of my adult life.
This reading is bringing me great pleasure, making my decision to lie low and stay inside most of the time a restful and enjoyable one.
2. Christy and Everett hosted a 4:00 Happy Hour in their back yard today and I mixed myself a dry martini with three green almond-stuffed olives and, with Debbie, headed over for some snacks and to yak about different things while sitting a ways a part from the others.
3. Back home, Debbie and tuned back into the podcast, Bag Man. To refresh where we'd been last night, we listened once again to Episode 5 which covered the negotiations between the Justice Dept. and Spiro Agnew's attorneys as they worked out a way for Agnew to resign as vice-president but not spend any time in jail -- or as it turned out, not pay a fine or own up to most of the crimes he'd committed. The two sides reached agreement. Agnew resigned. We then listened to Episodes 6 and 7 and learned more about the widening rift that developed between Agnew and Nixon, some of the deep fears for his own safety Agnew felt, and, in the last episode, listened to one attorney from each side and a historian have a round table discussion with Rachel Maddow reflecting back on this remarkable development in the history of the U.S.A.
When Bag Man drew to its end, Debbie and I decided we weren't ready to stop listening to podcasts, so I put on the first season of Slate's Slow Burn, hosted by Leon Neyfakh, a jounalist in his late twenties/early thirties who put together an eight episode exploration of some of the obscure aspects of the Watergate story. Debbie and I listened to this podcast back in February of 2018, but one of the pleasures of old age is that as we listened again tonight, we'd forgotten most of what we'd heard before and listening tonight was a fresh experience. We listened to Neyfakh's telling of the Martha Mitchell story and then we learned about the first Congressman, Texas' Wright Patman, to try to open a Congressional investigation of the break-in, soon after it happened, but could not get the Democratic majority of the House Committee on Banking and Currency he chaired to agree to issue subpoenas and this investigation, in the fall of 1972, never happened.
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