Perspiration, Orange, and Theogony

Yesterday I was so hungry that I went grocery-shopping again. Afterward I baked chicken thighs in the oven, with butter and rosemary and pepper as well as salt and a little artificial seasoning (which both appeared to vanish in the course of the baking); and threw together a salad of chicory, fennel, apple and orange. As for the dressing, I shook in white wine vinegar at first out of panic that the chicory might turn brownish at the edges, then squeezed the juice of half an orange and swirled honey in it; but I have to admit that when I drank the dressing that was left in the dish after the salad was eaten, its taste was hardly tempting.

Lastly, I prepared chestnuts. I had the vague intuition that they might be done after one of them blew apart with a thump — specifically, with a thump that I heard even over the humming computers in the nearby room. I might not even have known what the thump was, if not for a similar mishap with roasting pumpkin seeds that transpired around Hallowe'en.


***

This evening I did very little. I did peek further into Brick Lane, which I had vaguely remembered being mentioned around the year when it was published. It is set in the world of immigrants from India and Pakistan and — in the case of the protagonist — Bangladesh, in later 20th-century London. It began to go directly against the grain after the narrator, who tells the story from the perspective of the protagonist, seemed to regard racism as a thing that only exists in cases of blatant prejudice and, let's say, slurs — not as an underpinning stratum of polite bias and simmering prejudice.

(Why I am handing down verdicts on the phenomenon of racism, despite lacking the required experiential knowledge, one may still well ask.) It's the heroine's self-aggrandizing husband who grumbles that racism is why he has not gotten a higher salary at work; and he is an unreliable authority. I still think that the implications of the passage are awful.

It's fluent but thoughtful reading, and the kind of fashionable writerly verbiage for which I have little use is left as a light sprinkle of herbs and not as the main dish, and its popularity was fairly earned, I think. The life of immigrants in European cities is also fascinating to me, in the present and in general. But I still wasn't 'gripped' tightly enough to read the rest of Brick Lane.

*

Early last week I took up Hesiod's Theogony. There is a delightful hardcover edition in pastels in the Oxford Classical Texts line — all editions of which are still listed on the Press's website, it seems — in our shelves. The idea is perhaps to learn Greek rather sketchily from its earlier forms to its present-day forms, since I still worry that I might accidentally fish out what little Classical Greek I remember and further dilute the well of Modern Greek in embarrassingly malapropos moments, unless there is a chronological framework and partition. Returning to the Classical Texts, the typography with 'c's instead of 'σ's and 'ς's was a little foreign. It was fine, though; it's the Latin and the Greek commentary and annotations that are still a bit over my head, like this effusion:

SUDAE VITA

‘Ηcίοδος⋅ Κυμαῖος, Δίου καὶ Πυκιμήδης⋅ νέος δὲ κομιcθεὶς ὑπὸ τοῦ πατρὸc ἐν Ἄcκρῃ τῆc Βοιωτίαc.

Και τα λοιπά . . .


Sudae's sounding like sudor, and ignorance of the mere existence of the word sūdus, was a significant distraction from the beginning . . .

(By the way, all of the 'ς's, instead of 'c's, are likely ones that were written by mistake into my notes.)

P.S. The acronym of the blog post title has no special meaning. ;c)