Since arriving in Florida from New York, I’ve been rather busy taking care of the sorts of things one must to successfully maintain dual households.
I shall not bore you with the details; but I will say this: I’m massively looking forward to returning to NY in early July. Living amongst the deplorables is like swimming in a sea of diarrhea, with no terra firma in sight.
I’d like to have everything finished up by the weekend of July 4th, which is a national holiday here in America. Waiting for that event is what’s keeping my head above the slush.
While not busy running around taking care of various chores, I’ve been catching up with the Danish series Borgen, which I did not see when it first came out. It is pretty good in parts, but a tad melodramatic in others, especially at the tail end of season three. Was glad to see the loathsome Alexander Hjort (a despicably full-of-himself character) get his comeuppance. I hope the new season that was just released on Netflix does not disappoint.
Speaking of things Alex, a book published in 1996 — the reading of which has been long-deferred — is now helping me pass the time in purgatory.
It’s called Cavafy’s Alexandria. The author is the late Edmund Keeley, who served — among his many accomplishments — as the president of PEN for two years, just prior to when this book was published.
What a pleasure to read English writing of this quality — a far cry from the dreck most of us are exposed to on cable news or social media or even well-regarded newspapers — written by a prolific Princeton academic who does not burden us with showy erudition, but merely uses his vast research on the topic in eloquent support of the evocative subject at hand.
And this subject is one that is very dear to me, it being essentially the milieu of the city of ‘Iskindriya, as she was, when Egyptians referred to as Arrousa el Bahr, well before baladi unpleasantness trashed the place beyond redemption.
I lived there, once — a teen hanging out in a summer chalet by the Mediterranean, when the world still made sense, and everything was always beautiful.
Leaving Amerika 