This is something that has been making its rounds today, but I’ll share it too. Art Spiegelman talks to Maurice Sendak: http://blowncovers.com/post/22653289640/well-miss-you

I haven’t read The Bat-Poet for years, or seen the pictures. For some reason it was the first thing I thought of.

I’ve been reading too many books at once for the past year, so I simplified. I am sticking to one at a time, while I wait for my Norwegian books to make it overseas. Right now I am on The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, one of my favorites.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Grandmother said, “and I got to thinking about sad things.” She sat up in bed and reached for her cigarettes. Sophia handed her the matches automatically, but she was thinking about other things.

“You’ve got two blankets, don’t you?” Sophia said.

“I mean it all seems to shrink up and glide away,” Grandmother said. “And things that were a lot of fun don’t mean anything any more. It makes me feel cheated, like what was the point? At least you ought to be able to talk about it.”

In other news, I found out about sweet potato noodles - and japchae - and will never be the same again. My grandpa and I are getting started on a project to put up a bluebird house by my grandma’s grave. She’s buried far enough away from the city that it might work. I’ve been sick a lot lately but the nights are nice still, and I’m not letting it get to me in the in-betweens. I was doing a lot of origami for a while and then stopped. I’m trying to write again. My sister writes so much more than I do, I have to catch up. Things are pretty okay, and will, I think, get better.

1. Salonica, City of Ghosts by Mark Mazower

“Even today house-owners sometimes dream that beneath their cellars lie Turkish janissaries and Byzantine necropoles. One reads stories of hidden Roman catacombs, doomed love-affairs and the unquiet souls who haunt the decaying villas near the sea….But Salonica’s ghosts emerge in other ways too, through documents and archives, the letters of Byzantine archbishops, the court records of Ottoman magistrates and the hagiographies of the lives and extraordinary deaths of Christian martyrs. The silencing of the city’s multifarious past has not been for lack of sources….”

2. The Viking Age: A Reader, eds. Angus A. Somerville and R. Andrew McDonald

“On this account the people [in Iceland] dwell in underground caves, glad to have roof and food and bed in common with their cattle. Passing their lives thus in holy simplicity, because they seek nothing more than what nature affords, they can joyfully say with the Apostle: ‘But having food, and wherewith to be covered, with these we are content.’ For instead of towns they have mountains and springs as their delights. Blessed, I say, is the folk whose poverty no one envies; and in this respect most blessed because all have now adopted Christianity….”

This comes from one of a few excerpts in The Viking Age of a history written by Adam of Bremen ca. 1072-75/6. He has a sort of tickled curiosity about these northerners who have only recently converted to Christianity, and a lot to say about them, too, just about all of it gleaned from hearsay. Those who have not converted—like the Sami people—get the cycloptic barbarian treatment, each damned and one-eyed soul having to hop around on the one foot Adam allows them through their sadly misinformed and miscreated lives.

3. Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse

“The years had turned Sir Gregory into a man of portly habit; and, as portly men do in moments of stress, he puffed. But, puff he never so shrewdly, he could not blow away that paragraph. It was still there, looking up at him, when the door opened and the butler announced Lord Emsworth and Mr Galahad Threepwood.”

4. The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam Harris

“Many moral skeptics piously cite Hume’s is/ought distinction as though it were well known to be the last word on the subject of morality until the end of the world. They insist that notions of what we ought to do or value can be justified only in terms of other ‘oughts,’ never in terms of facts about the way the world is. After all, in a world of physics and chemistry, how could things like moral obligations or values really exist? How could it be objectively true, for instance, that we ought to be kind to children? / But this notion of ‘ought’ is an artificial and needlessly confusing way to think about moral choice. In fact, it seems to be another dismal product of Abrahamic religion—which, strangely enough, now constrains the thinking of even atheists. If this notion of ‘ought’ means anything we can possibly care about, it must translate into a concern about the actual or potential experience of conscious beings (either in this life or some other). For instance, to say that we ought to treat children with kindness seems identical to saying that everyone will tend to be better off if we do. The person who claims that he does not want to be better off is either wrong about what he does, in fact, want (i.e., he doesn’t know what he’s missing), or he is lying, or he is not making sense. The person who insists that he is committed to treating children with kindness for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone’s well-being is also not making sense. It is worth nothing in this context that the God of Abraham never told us to treat children with kindness, but He did tell us to kill them for talking back to us (Exodus 21:15, Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21, Mark 7:9-13, and Matthew 15:4-7). And yet everyone finds this ‘moral’ imperative perfectly insane. Which is to say that no one—not even fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews—can so fully ignore the link between morality and human well-being as to be truly bound by God’s law.”

Except for that note I wrote after Adam of Bremen’s passage—and one here to say that the line about moral skeptics “piously” citing Hume is a little cute, although Harris has probably met some opponents in debate who have spoken exactly as if they’d already read the last word—I’m going to leave these quotations here without my thoughts, which I hope not to have too fully until I’ve finished reading each book.

As a New Year’s gift to myself, I took out a subscription to Past & Present, too—a nice history journal to read before work in the morning. Then it’s off to catch my trolley, through the cold weather that I’ve secretly started to like. I think it will be a pretty good year.