Morning

I used to find the voice of Liane Hanson (the Sunday Weekend Edition host) unbearably annoying, and now I kind of like it. It's amazing how you can get used to anything, and then it's a short step from there to affection. I've made the same journey with other NPR voices too.

Listening to the news about the judicial confirmations, I also remembered that I keep thinking it should have been the NUCULER (instead of nuclear) option--that would have been fitting.

Something that always seems weird to me listening to the radio is the cheerfulness of the traffic reports: "there's a car overturned on the on-ramp! Watch out for debris!" The host sounds kind of pleased about this, and I'm picturing the car, the people, the total disaster that has struck someone.

That reminds me of something I was just reading, from a book of essays by Wislawa Szmborska; in an essay about why academic history doesn't interest poets much, she says "Unfortunately the poet still thinks in images. On reading, for example, that one group's agricultural plans "came into conflict with their neighbors' interests," he immediately envisions chopped-off heads tossed into wicker baskets. Moreover, the instinct common to all primitive creatures whispers that these baskets were woven by blind slaves, who were captured and blinded during the course of some earlier "conflict."" She says earlier in the same essay that when poets sit down to write they shed the clothing of civilization to "stand exposed before all as a savage with a ring through his nose. Yes, yes, a savage, since what else can you call a person who talks in verse to the dead and the unborn, to trees, to birds, and even to lamps and table legs, expect perhaps an idiot?" I like what she's saying, but I also think it's funny about the nose ring. What about the poets who wear them all the time?

Overheard outside:

Else: MAMA! MAMA! JACOB TOOK TWO PEACHES!
Mama: They're apricots.
Else and Jacob: APRICOTS, APRICOTS, APRICOTS...