Month: August 2016

Discoveries Upon Existential Meanderings

at-the-existentialist-cafe-uk-coverMy favorite current read — likely the best book I’ve read for a couple of years — is Sarah Bakewell’s “At The Existentialist Cafe“.  However, for me, the thing has quite tiny print, even as a hardback, that rather quickly exhausts my aging eyesight.  So I have considered buying a Kindle version (resizable text), but upon visiting Bakewell’s website, I found that the BBC has published audio readings of the thing.  Alas, the BBC readings seem to be time-limited, and have now expired (however, I made a mental note and a bookmark to pay attention to the BBC Book of the Week site for future reference for other readings of other books).  And then there is the Audible site where you can find and hear a three or four minute sample.  Finally, I came upon John Hockenberry’s interview with Bakewell in April of this year.  Check ’em all out.

After I mentioned our library visit last week, Herman tells me that he recently read this book as well.  But he didn’t make any further comment, except to say that he had once visited Sartre and de Beauvoir’s graves in the Montparnasse cemetery near his apartment at the time … And it was probably about the time when I first met Herman in 1960s college that I read, like many other students of that era, Sartre’s “Nausea”.  Just reminiscing … never mind.

rDay Four-Hundred-Ninety-Eight: The Real Rinehart Canyon

Turns out that our earlier June visit only got us to the very tip of Rinehart Canyon.  We learned this from a discussion at Farmers Market with an old neighbor, an employee of the Forest Service.  So we hit the road at 7am this morning and turned off the highway at Philberg Road.  Soon the road became overgrown with brush and weeds, so we parked and hiked as far as the old bridge that crosses the Grande Ronde River.  This required nearly three hours of traversing a path that was really the old highway but varied in width from about two to ten feet.  In places the brush was dense and higher than our heads, barely allowing clearance to slip through one at a time.  In a couple of spots we had to scramble over rock slides and piles.  And of course: an abundance of birds.

Last Chance U.

Confession:  As a genre, sports movies are not my favorite thing.  But tonight we did the first two episodes of this six-part Netflix documentary.   Run, don’t walk to your TV or computer  and get online with this one, whether or not you give a rip about football.  The thing follows the humans — players, coaches, and all the rest — involved in the football program of East Mississippi Community College (aka Last Chance U.) in the tiny (population 761) town of Scooba, Mississippi.  One of the best documentaries of any kind I’ve seen for a long time …
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