I knew that

[David Casseres]

I wrote:

>And then there's "'Round Midnight" -- about the saddest song I can think 
>of.  Also in the running is "Motherless Children."

And I forgot to mention CrosbyStills&Nash's "Four and Twenty," one of the 
very few modern pop songs that I find actually sad; and it has that line 
that Pynchon himself could have written:

   I embrace
   the many-colored beast

***

By the way, when listing my current reading I forgot to mention one that 
I am slowly working through, that has various tenuous relevancies to 
Pynchon: The Desert Road to Turkestan by Owen Lattimore, recently 
reissued in paperback by Kodansha, along with his High Tartary and 
Turkestan Reunion by his wife, Eleanor Lattimore.

And what have I been eating?  Well once in a while it's worth telling 
about.  Saturday I cooked up a pot of coda alla vaccinara (oxtail stew, 
Italian butchers' style) and some braised leeks and artichokes, and for a 
first course we had a little pasta with New Zealand mussels.  The most 
exciting part, though, was a hot loaf of French bread made almost 
entirely by my 12-year-old daughter, including the week-long fermentation 
of a French-style starter.

Sunday night I baked up the leftovers of a batch of Sicilian pasta with 
sardines, anchovies, pine nuts and saffron, and made some bruschetta out 
of a few slices of the second loaf of bread, and we had a salad and the 
rest of the bread.

So today I'm kind of fat, and I guess I'll wait until next week and a new 
epi-Pynchonesque thread before telling you all, in exquisite intellectual 
detail, what I look like with my clothes off...



Cheers,
David