Oddments of High Unimportance

Locopops’ ice cream board

We attended the No Kings rally yesterday at Durham’s Central Park, along with 5,000 to 7,000 other folks. A beautiful sunny, warm day with lots to see. So loud and crowded we could barely hear the speakers, but the vibe was everywhere.

A quote from the Indy Week story linked above:

“Then [[at the time of the previous No Kings rally]], it seemed like it was on the edge. Now, we’ve fallen off the edge. We are falling, free falling. So it’s that imperative, like today, to come together even stronger,” Monpetit said. “Hopefully, coming together like this, we can figure out who we are and what we’re doing together. The more we talk, the better.”

A friend told me of the “Drunk Trump Game”, which is to find on YouTube a speech by the current occupant and then play it at a speed of .5 or .75. To my ear, he doesn’t sound so much drunk as sleepy.

(“Current occupant” is the appellation used by Orange Crate Art, which we have adopted.)

Finished reading: An Old Woman’s Reflections by Peig Sayers 📚

Life on Great Blasket island, three miles off the west coast of Ireland, was hard and cold, with a meager living scratched out from the ground and the sea. Life in the 20th Century was as primitive as it had been in the 18th and 19th. Among other effects of this isolation was the community’s continued reliance on Gaelic to pass along its rich oral tradition of history and folktales. The island never had more than 150 or so inhabitants and was eventually abandoned in 1953.

Oxford University Press published a series of seven books of Great Blasket memoirs and reminiscences. Peig Sayers was hailed as one of the island’s great storytellers. Her book is a collection of transcriptions of stories written down for her by her son, stories she remembered from others’ telling and stories of what happened to herself.

It took a while for me to get into the rhythm of the book; these stories were meant to be told, of course, not written. When she quotes poetry, the words are transcribed into English as lines of unrhymed prose, so there is a natural loss of emotion and power. And I’m sure the music and rhythms of her speech, the way she would tell the story, would make these reminiscences come alive in a way that they don’t on the quiet page.

Still, as descriptions of a time and place long gone, I was fascinated by the details of the lives they led and the characters she knew. Since we can’t recapture the experience of Peig’s storytelling on the page, here’s a description of the effect they had on a neighbor who had actually sat around her fireplace and heard her stories:

Often her thoughts would turn to sad topics; she might tell, for instance, of the bitter day when the body of her son Tom was brought home, his head so battered by the cruel rocks he had fallen on from the cliff that his corpse was not presentable to the public. So Peig, with breaking heart, had gathered her courage together and with motherly hands had stroked and coaxed the damaged skull into shape. ‘It was difficult,’ she would say; and then, with a flick of the shawl she wore, she would invoke the name of the Blessed Virgin, saying ‘Let everyone carry his cross.’ ‘I never heard anything so moving in my life,’ a Kerryman confessed to me, ‘as Peig Sayers reciting a lament of the Virgin Mary for her Son, her face and voice getting more and more sorrowful. I came out of the house and I didn’t know where I was.’

Finished:

• The Irish Writers: Oscar Wilde by David Pritchard 📚
• The Irish Writers: W.B. Yeats by David Ross 📚
• The Irish Writers: George Bernard Shaw by David Ross 📚

A neat little set of literally mini-biographies – each about 200 pages and about 4"x6" – very easy to hold in the hand. Bought from a newsagent’s across the street from Trinity College in June 2025. Apart from their major works, I knew very little of these authors so these little biographies suited me just fine. Stray observations:

• Ross is the better writer of the two. His command of context and content, and his style, simply made his two books more enthralling and readable. The first chapter of his Shaw book, “Two Cities,” summarizes in 11 pages the economic, historic, religious, and cultural conditions of London and Dublin. It is a confident, breathtaking summary that provides a context for the emergence of Shaw – and Wilde and Yeats – onto the cultural and literary scene.
• The Wilde book compresses an awful lot into a small space. What it illuminated for me was how long it took Wilde to “become” Wilde. I did not know how relatively late in life his success came, with his discovery of plays and their witty, aphoristic dialog being perhaps his ideal literary form. I also did not know that his father also indulged in sexual misadventures, which brought stress, shame, and hard times to his mother and family. The sins of the father…
• While Yeats and Shaw did not engage in sexual adventures in the same way, they had their own hangups and issues with women that distracted their wives and caregivers. Yeats sponged off of them, Shaw adored the adoration of his younger female correspondents while stringing them along and keeping his paper conversations a secret from his wife.
• An irony that linked all three of these Irishmen: their desire to be active players on the larger literary stage of London. From Ross’s book on Shaw:

Of the three, Yeats was most involved with their home country. Part of his vision was to establish a modern Irish literature, written in English, and Ireland continued to be a prime source of his inspiration, even though he spent as much time in England as he did there. Wilde was not concerned with Ireland. Shaw never forgot that he was an Irishman, and like Yeats was a Unionist who believed in Home Rule. But, though much in his thought and writing is Irish, he did not feel the rootedness in Irish history and culture that Yeats felt and nourished. He wanted to reform not Ireland or England, but the world.

Finished reading: Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan 📚

One of the blurbs says “ice cool, self aware, and very funny.” Definitely icy and detached. A witty novel of a young lower-class Irish woman in Hong Kong and her romantic and sexual adventures among higher-class striving junior professionals. The characters are so high-verbal and articulate that you could cut yourself on their casual, lacerating banter. Ava, the narrator, is so detached from her own life and needs that I felt equally distanced; as funny and sparky as she could be, I also wanted to shake her and tell her to grow up. Though that last page is really good: her body finally chooses what her busy mind has denied her. The last of the books I bought in Ireland.

The Chris Ware-designed stamps arrived today! I bought two; one to use, one to keep.

Typical Ware genius of meticulous design and wit in storytelling: “The pane of 20 interconnected stamps shows a bird’s-eye view of a mail carrier’s route through a bustling town. Laid out in 4 rows of 5, the stamps depict the story through the 4 seasons from top-left to bottom-right.”

Just discovered via the New York Times that although I’ve considered myself a Libra all these years, now I’m a Virgo. I’m sure there’s a difference.

Took the morning deliberately slowly, let myself go down various online rabbit holes, and then BAM nonstop activity for 3 hours. I keep wanting to leave my old time management habits behind in retirement, but I don’t think I can.