City life

Yesterday was the latest ROLT event.  It's now at the Victory Cafe as a regular place, and fifteen people showed up!  The topic was City Life.  I read St. Paul's sermon in Athens, where he mentioned seeing a temple dedicated "to the Unknown God." (How modern!) I also read from Charles Dickens' Bleak House, both the opening page where he describes London fog and the passage where Jo the street urchin shows Lady Deadlock the place where her first husband is buried.  I also brought Dorothy Parker's "The Standard of Living," about two young women in New York City, but decided not to read it this time.

The other people were reading a lot of interesting stuff.  Jane read from a book publishing letters Dickens' son wrote from Ottawa in the 1870s after he moved to Canada and joined the mounties; and from a Mavis Gallant book about the 1968 Paris student protests.   Several people read their own writing.  A man from Turkey read two translations he'd written of a paragraph from a Turkish book about Istanbul and asked which one we preferred. (I voted for the second one, but I'd have to read them for a true judgement.) I mentioned that some time this year we'd have an event with translations of foreign-language writing as the topic.

I also solicited $5 in annual dues from those who hadn't paid last month, and I now have half my Meetup expenses paid!  Since they all wrote their names down on the reverse of the Meetup table poster, I later noticed that Yvonne paid in both months, so I'll have to reimburse her sometime.