A Third Weekend in January on a Northeast Coast of the United States of America: (yes, the) weather, books, praise for Mr. Sasha B. Cohen

The weather, moody brute, has rained and gloomed and moped and sighed, rather like me, really, this weekend, but, unlike myself, abruptly turned artic yesterday afternoon, blasts of freezing air racing up and down streets like, I don’t know, they had somewhere to go. Even simple things like schlepping home groceries starts to seem a little dire and Jack Londonish when deep winter takes back the upper hand. Happily, my apartment radiators are like big bombs of hot air going off at all times and the indoors felt something blissful, like in a Hindu myth where one winds up on a lotus, finally free of your worldly discomforts and human stupidity. It is nice to be warm. But those self-same radiators drive my Canadian roommate to overheated distraction, poor lamb. She likes the tip of her nose to be cold.

To wit: I finally finished Max Beerbohm’s The Happy Hypocrite, the virtues of which only serve to remind me that if I find on my deathbed I never did finish Zuleika Dobson, I will feel silly. V. drole, that Mr. Beerbohm.
Also completed No Bed of Roses, by Faith Baldwin, a novel from 1974 I found among many other such enticingly forgotten-looking books at the library. The story follows a young couple in small New England village discovering the difference between what it is to be snug and what it is to be smothered. An interesting book for a woman of eighty to write, I think. There is a feel of the romance writer aspiring to realism, but my sense is most of her effort seems to have been on yanking the Old World (all that came before) up to the New (Aquarius age—much reference to women’s libbers, etc.) and stitching them together, thereby making sense out of both vis-à-vis the institution of marriage. I’m not sure she succeeds but I like that she tried.
Now trying my hand at The Poems of Catullus, in a new translation by Peter Green, who, god bless him, is wearing an ascot in his photo. So far the poems are pettish and funny and beautiful and obscene, just as was promised on the book jacket although oops, now that I look at it again, I see that isn’t true, not really. Must be something about the typeface? Well, anyway, I’m liking it just fine, and wouldn’t mind if the words kind of go ahead and germinate deep in the dirt of my brain. I could use them.

A moment of recognition for Sasha Cohen, one of those human beings whose undertakings makes me glad to call myself one too. And I haven’t even seen the Ali G interview with Noam Chomsky yet. Ah, me.