Red Letter, Er, Red Number Days, They Are Here

      . . . . Am looking at my wall calendar, above the computer desk. 

O my, there are red reminder circles around quite a few dates!  Which hasn't been the case in nearly 16 months, generally speaking.  Additionally, there are the arrows running across a week of dates indicating when el V leaves for Miami, and when he returns. Holy Cow! He has a research residency at the Ayallah Archive at the Florida International University.  This will include giving a webinar while in residence at the Diaz Ayala Center of Florida International University's Cuban Research Institute on Thursday, July 1, at 2 pm Eastern: "Teaching the Cuban Discography: The Archive as Clave." As the title suggests, he's preparing a course in the Cuban discography.

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. . . . The long persistent 'heat dome' disintegrated a couple of days ago.  My toes are confused. After such a nice time of sandal freedom, they are back in sox and boots, with long sleeves and / or light sweater outside. Which means that the coming week looks like 'normal' lovely June weather of earlier years.

Nevertheless, it's difficult to rejoyce too much. The They Sayers are saying covid's here for good. Why yes, just forget about that herd immunity fantasy.  Ain't happening, ain't gonna happen, folks. Why yes, this is no kind of surprise.

Due to Delta spread it does seem the UK isn't going to completely open this week, which is good.  But we're wide open here, so we know what to look forward to.

While the new surges in Southeast Asia are of course hitting hard the factory workers who make everything we USians use.  Again, not a surprise, is this? Along with this is the ever-increasing housing crisis in this nation.  Much of this is caused by capitalism, all right. The wide-spread, grinding, relentless poverty -- just starting with utterly unaffordable housing -- in the USA is a deliberate policy choice:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/13/opinion/stimulus-unemployment-republicans-poverty.html?

And yet so many obscenely wealthy wonder why so many of us believe they are the greatest danger to family, community, society and security ever created.

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. . . .  WATCHING:  Lupin, Part 2, went up on Netflix this weekend. 

My goodness the writers, camera people and editors do tension in this show. It's breathtaking how many narrow escapes upon narrow escapes they can pile up in a single sequence of a single episode.  I've never seen anything quite like this. And while doing so they manage to create visual jokes that add commentary.

For a single sample, in one scene Our Protagonist, Assane Lupin, captured and handcuffed in a police vehicle, stops a station to refuel, naturally requests to use the bathroom -- and of course, hands cuffed behind him, requires assistance from the guardian cop. All through this sequence are people holding hoses and engaged in other activity, that with a restroom in the picture, provides comic, um, er, well ya, relief!  Only the French could have done this so elegantly, subtly, refusing to draw any attention to itself, lacking broad vulgarity (which broad vulgarity, of course the French do as much as every other culture on the planet), while containing wit.

Ya, this show is special in every way, because it is so French, making no gestures toward that blandness of deliberately trying for an international audience. Lupin was conceived from the gitgo for a French audience, not a global one.  The producers are fairly convinced that this is why the show became an unexpected  international blockbuster -- it is relaxed within its French context, from source material to culture to cast, to locations.

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. . . . READING: The Horde: How the Mongols Changed The World (2021) by Marie Favereau. 

Definitely in the top 5 of the books read this year.  I don't like it that I've only a few more pages left to read in this book. It was so pleasant to sink into Eurasia in the era given to us by Chinggis Khan, until the Bubonic Plague and other factors diminished the bloodlines of the Hordes, and the rise of the Ottomans.  Believe it: if you think you know about the Mongols and what they did, you very likely do not, as one learns by reading this book. A solitary sample: how many of us have even considered how much the Hansa trading consortium depended on, and was integrated into the Hordes' commercial system?

Having concluded Justinian's Flea as our bedtime together Read-Aloud, we have embarked on a very old book, recommended by the author of same, but published way back in 1971, Peter Brown's The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-75. Thus in many ways, presenting a perspective that contemporary scholarship no longer supports. It's a slim book, during which one does frequently observe, "My! how late antiquity has changed in the 21st century!"

We will follow this as our Read-Aloud with The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400-1000 (The Penguin History of Europe - 2009), by Chris Wickham.  All our faves included -- Goths! Vandals! Mameluks! Mongols! Ottomans!  And most of all, Charlemagne!

I remain puzzled though: why does the Eastern Empire interest me so much less than either the old or new Western Empire, or the Mongols or the Turks?

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* I do not need to be informed that French expression can and does resort to that kind of humor as much as does every other culture in the world. Ha!