Dear Everyone,
This will be a pretty short letter. Of great note, beyond the successful Bar
Mitzvah of Adam Tuchler yesterday is the fact that 21 years ago today Lucas
Brown entered the world (fairly precipitously).
He and Cindy drove to Oberlin Friday night, because he had some items
left in storage (he was off campus for 8 months) at a friend’s house in
Cleveland. Everything had to be added to
the load in Cindy’s car and then driven back to Oberlin. They stayed an in a
hotel Friday evening and nice weather on Saturday led to an easy move into Lucas’
monk-like space. The rooms there are
really small; I hope Jasper has more space at CMU. I bought some chocolate pie to eat in his
honor when I made a grocery trip earlier today to get ingredients for tortilla
soup. Lucas did cook a couple of other
dishes before he left. 1) A good, if
somewhat bland, chicken in white wine with leeks, and 2) some kind of legume
soup with lentils, chickpeas, black-eyed peas, fennel tops, beet tops, and
leeks. Nicely thick, but a bit too salty
for me (Cindy didn’t think so).
I am making the soup today for Jasper. He is coming down with his 3rd or 4th cold
this swim season. I think his practices
are too long, he is too stressed, and he doesn’t get enough sleep. Plus, I’m sure high school is constantly rampant
with a variety of infectious disease. He
swam pretty well in this weekend’s meet, and we are looking forward to his
conference meet next Saturday. The big
deal with him over the last couple of weeks is playing the ‘assassin game’. This is basically a circular chain game where
each person has a potential victim ahead of them, and an unknown assassin behind
them in the circle. You have to ‘kill’
(with a squirt gun or nerf gun) your victim, or survive your assassination attempt
to make it to the next round. Jasper was
able to kill his assassin in self-defense after her second attempt on his
life. In the first one, she tried to
ambush him walking out of a senior swim dinner, and he managed to get
away. In the second attempt there was
some complex plot where one of the assassin’s minions was hiding in a large box
on our front porch while she hid, waiting for him to investigate the box. Jasper
was not about to fall for a Trojan Horse plan, and managed to take out his
killer. He has had no luck in getting to
his target, who is an over 6 foot tall All-American soccer player who lives in one
of 8 multi-family buildings near the high school. Luckily, the rules for this game are a bit
more complicated than I detailed, and this Sunday the survivors get their names
re-shuffled and a new set of targets.
People at the Bar Mitzvah were asking what I had been
reading lately, so I will leave you with these four:
Medusa’s
Web by Tim Powers. This is similar
to his ‘Fault Lines’ trilogy. Powers is
great at writing these creepy novels using historical figures (like Edison in
above). This time it’s old Hollywood,
and as usual involves possession of people.
Nod by Adrian
Barnes This book was short-listed
for some prizes. What happens to the
world if suddenly the ability to fall asleep ends for 99.99% of the population? Chaos, anarchy, and the end of civilization
within days.
The
Deep Sea Diver’s Syndrome by Serge Brussolo
Hard to explain, but basically, some people have the ability to go into
their dreams and pull out quasi-physical abstract objects which are sold in art
markets. Brussolo is a well published
French author; this is the first book he has had translated into English.
The
Man Who Wasn’t There by Anil Ananthaswamy.
This is non-fiction in the rich vein that Oliver Sachs mined. An investigation of the neurologic
underpinnings of our sense of self, by looking at patients who have specific
syndromes and MRI/PET-identified brain abnormalities. More philosophic than the typical Sachs’
book, either by the inclination of the author, or perhaps the subject matter. I liked the epilogue the best, but other
chapters might strike you as more worthwhile.
Love, H.
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