Now

Ten things I am doing right now, or "doing" right now:

1. Waiting for M to arrive home from Strasbourg.

2. Listening to the wind blow the contents of the street from one end to the other. Jingling glass bottles, loud unexplained bangs, and the rushing whoosh of Bruxellois wind.

3. Listening to Stéphane Grappelli play "La chanson des rues." On iTunes, obviously. Though I did see him live once, before he died in the late nineties.

4. Planning to make brownies. Yes, from a mix (one that traveled across the Atlantic in my mother's suitcase), but a mix of Ghirardelli brownies.

5. Doing an online search for custom bookplates because for ages I've been wanting an "Ex Libris" that has an engraving of a robin and music on it. Birdsong, get it? But evidently this is easier imagined than done. And expensive.

6. Translating medieval Catalan recipes. The latest, called "Freixures," features lungs, heart and liver of mutton or pork. Yum. And you wonder why I don't attempt to replicate any of these recipes instead of making brownies?

7. Sweeping the house.

8. Researching Ernest Hemingway's appearance on Time magazine's cover in 1937, and its reportage of the Spanish Civil War, and trying to figure out whether he appeared on the cover because of the publication of To Have or Have Not, or because of publicity for the war and his documentary about it. Unfortunately for me and my thesis, I think it's the former. But I did discover that all of Time's archives are available online for free, which is useful and nice of them.

9. Contemplating whether I should write a conference paper about Hemingway's documentary, The Spanish Earth, or if the Hemingway/Spain thing is way overdone and I should stick with the poets. Or somehow combine them. Yes. Perhaps the latter, as I think I could finagle an angle wherein both Hemingway (in the documentary and an accompanying booklet) and the poets have this experience/mediation dichotomy going on. They tell us it's important to have "been there," but also that "beeing there" is just as hard to interpret as any media representation of the "there."

10. Ignoring what I discovered this morning, to my horror, namely, that mold is eating--nay, devouring--several pairs of our shoes stored in a corner under the staircase. And, I suspect, some of the suitcases also stored there. I didn't have the stomach to start digging around. We've got to get out of this house...