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Once shy, twice bit
Rabbit, rabbit! I guess for the season, I dreamed an extremely touching, part-historical, part-fantastic queer romance—I can still remember the grain on a photograph of the middle-aged lovers holding hands for the first time—and then dreamed that the DVD broke, which strikes me as a thoroughly unnecessary literalization of the way it is not possible to replay dreams awake. Have a couple of links.
1. I am as usual out of touch with whatever has been going on with the Red Sox, but I liked this cross-section of Boston and Jewish history and baseball: "Chaim Bloom may be (relatively) new to Boston, but his family roots run deep."
2. I love these photographs of Route 66 vibrating through time.
3. I wasn't supposed to be doing either of them, but the best parts of my experience of graduate school turned out to be performing in an opera and learning Akkadian (and having my first collections published, although the university itself had nothing to do with that). Eckart Frahm was one of the people I learned Akkadian from and I am delighted that he has a new book out: Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023). "In this regard you could say the Assyrians were not super-repressive" is very much the sort of thing he would say.
Otherwise I spent the afternoon making or following up on doctor's appointments, which may be par for the course around here for a while.
1. I am as usual out of touch with whatever has been going on with the Red Sox, but I liked this cross-section of Boston and Jewish history and baseball: "Chaim Bloom may be (relatively) new to Boston, but his family roots run deep."
2. I love these photographs of Route 66 vibrating through time.
3. I wasn't supposed to be doing either of them, but the best parts of my experience of graduate school turned out to be performing in an opera and learning Akkadian (and having my first collections published, although the university itself had nothing to do with that). Eckart Frahm was one of the people I learned Akkadian from and I am delighted that he has a new book out: Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire (2023). "In this regard you could say the Assyrians were not super-repressive" is very much the sort of thing he would say.
Otherwise I spent the afternoon making or following up on doctor's appointments, which may be par for the course around here for a while.
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Then again, I've always been playing with serious Yiddish again (via Sutzkever), after decades of relying on kitchen table Yiddish to get through life as an Ashkenazi Jew. So many languages, so little time. (And as with English language work all those years ago in my graduate school experience, you can tell I'm interested in a new thing as I start working on even older, mostly dead, languages.)
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I have never poked at Chaldaean, but I loved Akkadian. It was my first serious study of a Semitic language, which was hilarious even at the time because it is an extremely straightforward example of such and it's written in cuneiform which evolved originally as a syllabary for the agglutinative language of Sumerian, imagine how well it handles triliteral roots! (Spoiler: no.) Insofar as I had the time, I specialized in Neo-Assyrian rather than any variant of Babylonian, both because it's what we were trained on and because I wanted to read the version of Ištar's Descent to the Underworld preserved in the library of Aššurbanipal in Nineveh. It was worth it. In the process I got some terrific sex charms and a hangover cure.
(And as with English language work all those years ago in my graduate school experience, you can tell I'm interested in a new thing as I start working on even older, mostly dead, languages.)
Eh, sounds healthy to me.
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I know. Doesn't it?