Crowdread

Wednesday night at the History Meetup we discussed Modern Italy and the Risorgimento.  To help moderate the discussion, I made my winter cap into a talking stone and passed it around to whoever was in turn to talk. (Gotta find a better talking stone!)

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind arrived Friday and I've already read over 100 pages! Those teenage girls in Europe calling for action on climate change remind me of Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke!

I've joined a new Meetup called Crowdread. (Yesterday afternoon we met at the Reference Library.) It's a bit like my Reading Out Loud Meetup:  we bring a text or two and read from them, and discuss them.  John had some Oscar Wilde quotes from The Picture of Dorian Gray, Serge had a text about herd psychology, and Serge's girlfriend (how could I forget her name?) had a Marie Kondo passage about reducing clutter.

I've been reading the "Fear" issue of Lapham's Quarterly, so I read a couple of passages from that.  One was from Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon and involved the prisoner communicating with the next cell by tapping on the wall, so for dramatic effect I tapped my glasses on the table, which impressed John.  The other was from Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." It's a fun group and I'll be going again!

This afternoon I went to the I Wanna Sing group. (Had to miss the last two practices because of my cold!) We sang "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" and "You've Got a Friend."

Miriam introduced me to the Flanders and Swann song "The Armadillo." (I know several of their songs but not that one.) It's cute and haunting, in a slightly Noel Cowardesque way!