The above are my images of detail from the following works:
■ Janitor by Duane Hanson, 1973 ■ Wet Saturday by Martin Lewis, 1929 ■ Le Penseur de Notre Dame by John Taylor Arms, 1923 ■ The Fiddler by James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1859 ■ Untitled Anxious Audience by Rashid Johnson, 2017 ■ Portrait of Frederick Layton by George Henry Yewell, circa 1888 ■ Portrait of Dr. Karl Schwartz by Lovis Corinth 1916 ■ The Card Players by Eduard vin Grützner, 1883 ■ Triple Profile Portrait (The Mignons of Henry III) by School of Fontainebleau, 1570s
Since my last post, the light has shifted and softened, the sunflowers have bloomed, and my flutes have nearly made it back home. The fall semester — and with it, band rehearsals and weekly music lessons — begins next week. But this week, I am celebrating the near end of the summer.
Last night, after some noodles and bookstore wandering, we watched the White Sox handily beat the Yankees. Later this week, we plan to enjoy a post-tourist, post-summer-campers museum visit. And over the weekend, we will wander in one of the conservation areas.
During my music lesson this week, my teacher corrected an embouchure issue with which I have been struggling in piccolo practice. What a difference! Both my concert flute and alto flute are now en route to the technician for annual cleaning and adjusting, so for the next week or so I’m working with my trusty Yamaha.
Only three meetings remain in the Plato’s Republic reading group. Between the discussion and David Roochnik’s fabulous lectures, I am learning far more than I did forty years ago when I first read this work as a college freshman.
Slowly, surely, I am making my way through my Latin I tutorial. I have reached the point at which I can say that it brings me as much satisfaction as my music studies. (And it is just as difficult.)
Also slowly, surely, I’m accumulating mileage. The air quality and increasing temperatures make exercise difficult, but we take our primary walk early enough to mitigate some of the concerns.
I am a few pages away from finishing a smart and entertaining novel: Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang. (Review here.) In fact, the last few books I’ve read are worth mentioning:
■ The Fold (Peter Clines; 2015. Fiction.) ■ The Thursday Murder Club (Richard Osman; 2020. Fiction.) ■ The Man Who Died Twice (Richard Osman; 2021. Fiction.) ■ The Bullet That Missed (Richard Osman; 2022. Fiction.) ■ Long Live Latin: The Pleasures of a Useless Language (Nicola Gardini; 2019. Non-fiction.) ■ The Guest (Emma Cline; 2023. Fiction.)
The novels represent my favorite sort of summer reading (engaging, light without being utterly frivolous, sometimes even thought-provoking), and Gardini’s meditation on Latin was perfect. (Review here.)
News of Alan Arkin’s death prompted me to set aside Patrick Radden Keefe’s excellent Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty yesterday and watch Glengarry Glen Ross (appreciation here) and Little Miss Sunshine. It had been a long time since I had last seen GGR, but LMS is one I have revisited; both, as they say, hold up. A friend recommended Arkin’s books for younger readers, so I read The Lemming Condition earlier this year (review here); I may pull the sequel from the shelf today.
It’s a gloomy, gray, humid morning here, the sort of morning during which one thinks about the many things one could do, then actually accomplishes little. I’d like to buck that trend. (Is anyone else chuckling?)
Nerdishly 
