And leave some gin beside the bed for breakfast in the morning

The first thing of any substance I did this morning was bake an eggnog spiced rum cake. The rest of the day then involved making a CD of songs about impressment into the Royal Navy and annotating them for my father, looking at African and Oceanic art and prints by Albrecht Dürer at the MFA, and watching Eight Men Out (1988), which last caused me to spend about an hour reading about the Black Sox Scandal and being surprised my copy of W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982) is not in a box somewhere. Clearly I should start more days with spontaneous baking.

In my ongoing, probably doomed quest to post about things I've actually promised to: there may not be much to say about the Macbeth reading that took place two days after Christmas, except that it was a great deal of fun and we lost four people from the planned cast the day before, prompting last-minute reshuffling and Eric's remark that it seemed very unfair that a living-room line-reading of the Scottish Play should be just as cursed as a full-scale theatrical production. Nonetheless, it was good. I hadn't read a play aloud with people since my friend group at Yale did Much Ado About Nothing in 2005, and before that since a friend of mine who no longer keeps a livejournal shared all the parts in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus with me at Brandeis in 1999. Further discussion in comments, I suppose, if anyone's interested, but I am proud of the fact that having been given the role of Hecate, the witches' goddess who has two songs, I interpolated "O Death" in place of "Come away, come away," since the setting by Robert Johnson¹ was not going to work without at least a lute, and it was judged a suitably uncanny effect.

As a kind of belated holiday present, my father made me a small thing out of clay, celadon-glazed. He kept referring to it as a sea creature, some species of bottom-dweller; it seems to have started life as a fantasia on a trilobite and mutated from there. I think it's a sea-hedgehog. It has quills and tube feet. I'll try for pictures tomorrow.

1. The seventeenth-century lutenist, not the bluesman who met at a crossroads with the Devil; although I'm now thinking I should commit "John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore" on them, because that would be awesome.

In the clay the holes of hands

The small clay sea-thing is below the cut.

( Where the blind white sea-snakes are. )

A Month in the Country (1980) by J.L. Carr is a small, strange, and beautiful book. I discovered it in McIntyre and Moore's in December and never got around to describing it before the holidays hit. In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin arrives in the small village of Oxgodby, Yorkshire, to restore what might be a medieval mural newly discovered in the nearby church. He brings with him a secondhand overcoat, a change of clothes in a straw fish-bass, a nervous twitch and stammer, and a bad case of depression; the substance of the novella is what he leaves with. There is another young veteran, similarly employed to find out a fourteenth-century ancestor's grave. There is a stationmaster-preacher whose daughter brashes her way into watching him work. The reverend is standoffish of scholar-soldiers, but his wife looks like Botticelli's Primavera. And under Tom's hands as they recover their skill with whitewash and red ochre, the past—not the recent years of failed marriage and Passchendaele, but the unknowable era of a man who could paint hell and Christ like they were things that could be touched—seems to lie so close, it too might be within reach, like a woman's face under a straw hat, among limestone and roses. There are very few novels that feel like poems, but this is one of them. It is not a cross between A Canterbury Tale and A.E. Housman, either, but it shares some of their summer country and lost, remembered hills. And its discussions of stonemasonry and medieval painting are brisk and technical. I have no idea what else J.L. Carr wrote, but I'm not sure I care; A Month in the Country is perfect.