Once shy, twice bit

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[batdina]

Akkadian? I've been thinking about Chaldean, but maybe Akkadian is a better choice.

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.)

[asakiyume]

"[they] were not super-repressive" is a spectacular back-handed not-condemnation!

And those photos from Route 66 are so full of heartache: pictures of how things change.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

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

This is wonderful and I approve--the world needs more middle-aged queer romances, in dreams and everywhere else! <3

performing in an opera

Which one? (Sometimes, the best parts of life are definitely the ones we are not supposed to be doing...)

[ashlyme]

A good dream. But I'd like to have a word with that DVD.