More Delights and Disdains . . .

of a diminutive nature of late . . . Number 5

Disdains:

Learning of the death of editor Robert Gottlieb. He made my June 12 Delights list after viewing the 2022 documentary Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb. He was 92.

Learning of the death of author Cormac McCarthy. Harold Bloom, in his book How to Read and Why declared McCarthy literary heir to Faulkner and Melville; stating that McCarthy’s Blood Meridian “a canonical imaginative achievement, both an American and a universal tragedy of blood.” He was 89.

Delights:

Reading that a 1527 prayerbook belonging to Thomas Cromwell was discovered in England. Holbein the younger included it in a portrait of Cromwell. Though I am not sure that his business and political tactics would be met with approval today, he was the proto-practitioner of the early amalgamation of capitalism and Protestantism that runs through the backbone of the Anglo/American economy to this day.

Shopping for dorm room supplies with my son. THE STUFF and THE GEAR available these days resembles prepping for an Everest expedition . . . Anyway, this may sound tedious but it allows me some last minute interaction with him before he starts university with summer school a week from tomorrow.

Watching my son and the bank staffer set up his new checking account. When she asked him how much he had to deposit, he replied using the word “around” to which both the staffer and I said “be exact.”

Contemplating with gratitude on this Father’s Day that in spite of Parkinson’s, I have remained healthy enough to enjoy this time with my son.