Saturday, April 09, 2005

Bulletin from the Sickhouse

The entire household – yours truly, his lovely wife, the two (sometimes) charming children – laid low for the past few days by a very nasty virus. Mostly we just shuffle around groaning, pausing frequently to catch our breaths and avoid bouts of vertigo. Those who don’t live in “sun-belt” climates don’t know one of the worst aspects of that lifestyle: the fact that one has to suffer foul-weather illnesses in fair-weather surroundings. Aside from a bout of thunderstorms Thursday night, the weather has been astonishingly nice the past few days: sunny, slightly breezing, low to moderate humidity. There’s kind of a karmic rightness to having a foul cold when you’re living in (say) Ithaca, New York, or Edinburgh, at least during the nine months of the year when those place’s weather can be fairly called “unspeakable.” Having a bad cold in Boca Raton, on the other hand, makes one suspect that some deity is out to get one.

The cold hasn’t kept me from reading; and while I find I can’t get through more than a paragraph of the Bourdieu I’m working on without losing his thread (and that’s not always the case), it seems to be almost a perfect laboratory state for rather more non-linear things: Clark Coolidge’s Space, Steve McCaffery’s Theory of Sediment. More later – I have a pill to take.

1 comment:

E. M. Selinger said...

Are you suggesting, Mark, that you'd have to be sick in the head (with a cold, at least) to appreciate Coolidge and McCaffery? L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is a virus, as Wm. Burroughs used to say....