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You make your own fun but there needs to be enough you.

When there's not everything else is too much or too little by turns. Not what you need or swamping your needs such that you forget what they were exactly.

One of my grandmothers appeared in a napdream this evening, I was surprised how sharp she was and how youthful. She also seemed rather unhappy, though. That's not quite the word for her demeanor, actually: maybe more like, incapable of ever being happy with anything again. Death as completed disillusionment. As though only then do we swallow the fruit of the tree. I wonder if I mean what I dream. One of my first journal entries was about her funeral in I think Geneseo NY.

Naps make me lonely at night and seem so childish. Just look how melancholic they make me, damn things.

(no subject)

Too much wasabi makes a section of my scalp tingle unpleasantly (feels like my brain, as with headaches, but it's the scalp). Way too much and I get this bizarre reflex where I bend my head down and rub that part of it with my palm. It's genuinely reflexive, I can't not do it and it happens the same way each time--quite close to when you tickle that specific chest spot on many dogs. I love wasabi anyway, probably still more from that danger of humiliating and darkly instinctive behavior. Combined with the mercury and rawness, makes sushi quite an exciting meal.

Wonder what's up with that, the tendency to ascribe deep scalp sensations to the brain itself. Might lend something to the theory that we're wired to think of our bodies in a certain way: if certain headskin sensations are bottomless, maybe it aids the philosophically iffy notion that we're "in" there, therefore encourages special protective attention for the...organ? What is a head. Not a limb, certainly, and not just in the weak way that a thumb isn't a finger. Its being in its own category may also support a theory of locative self-concept. Foucault thought it was acculturated, didn't he? I guess there must be plenty of evidence of what different isolated cultures made of the head. Egyptians, Greeks, Christian Europeans etc. all had bad ideas of other internal organs' affecting thoughts (some of which we retain metaphorically, e.g. the role of the heart), but I can't remember any of them actually locating thinking outside the head.

(no subject)

Our new kitten is great fun, a frenetic tumbler, extraordinarily violent but usually sensitive to whether she's hurting you. We got her a bit too early, as she'd been abandoned. Only now is she muzzling out of that Tweety Bird/Tyra Banks looking stage of total helplessness. She plays incessantly with our boy cat, a very funny sight as she's only slightly larger than his head. She jumps on him from the side, he falls over, she grabs his face and they go at it. When he gets a grip on her he tonguebathes her maternally for a while.

We named her Akira, for both Kurosawa and the Denman St. sushi joint where Julie and I had our first meal together--and, since it's a boy's name, something of a homage to our girl cat Otis, who we lost a few months ago at age 17. I'm not sure it fits, so far. With both our older cats we picked one name and then drifted away from that toward something that felt more like them. Ingmar, for Bergman, is now Ingy--who's far too well-adjusted, loving and loveable to make a good homage. Alice, an astonishingly uncurious and unresourceful cat (and kind of retarded), lost all dignity as BooBoo over several stages ("she's like a black noodle"/Boodle/Boo).

(no subject)

Nobody tells me anything: Michael Hamburger died. His translations of Holderlin, Celan, Hofmannsthal, Trakl, Goethe, Rilke, Buchner etc. are usually the best ones (also wasn't too shabby with Baudelaire). He was shy about rhyme, but mostly because he couldn't stand, and never wrote, awkward rhymed translaterese. After Wilbur and the late Nims, my favorite contemporary translator. Apparently he befriended Sebald in his last years and shows up in his work, some of which he also translated. I've read only a little of his criticism and original poetry, but that little was rather fine. To the extent I have any read on his personality, I'd say he was very thoughtful. Poems are trying to work something out, and translations are trying to work out both that work and that something, seemed to be his view. Not much polished, but nothing glossed over. I'm startled to realize I've read more pages that he translated than original ones by many of my favorite writers. With great pleasure, too--meaning, I guess, that he was one.