Restless morning

Up early, restless, out for a pre-dawn breakfast, a bit of brooding & cruising, home and back to bed for a couple hours, up to read student work, just one to go, and I'm finally settling in for the day.

A very nice thank you from a former grad student of mine, who's become both a friend and fan, regarding the reader I mailed. All the necessary copies are out now, to the archive, the library, a handful of friends/fans. So if I get run over by a truck this morning, the essential distribution is taken care of ha ha. Things like that are important when you have no one covering your back. You have to do everything yourself.

But maybe somebody is covering my back and I don't know it. You never can tell.

Banjo is sure getting fun! The class is nicely organized in a way that makes us sounding damn good early on, even though what we're doing is easy. Good for the morale. But here's a surprise: only 4 of 10 in class last night! Has over half the class quit already? I mean, for a weekly class, and only eight of them, why miss one? Why pay the fee and then drop out? Online students used to do that on me all the time. Strange phenomenon.

So I have great stuff to practice this week! This is just what I need right now.

Started reading a history of screenwriting, which is misnamed I think ... starts off more like a book of stories and gossip, war stories, about screenwriters in Hollywood, a slightly different focus. But it's a fun read so far.

I finished the short history of the Cold War from an international perspective, which means more of our CIA atrocities are covered than in an American history, I suspect. Some pretty ugly stuff. We really have little right to take the moral high ground as we always do. Not since McKinley's dream. I blame it all on him ha ha. Hallucinating a visit from Christ. Just perfect for setting foreign policy. (If I now say Jesus, is that a pun?)

So Howard Zinn has passed. A fine man though he sometimes got too ideological for my tastes. His book is sure important.

Well, time to move on.