The Folio Deux Blog!

comments on what we've been doing and thinking, with links that elaborated upon or provoked our thoughts. We're happy to hear from you, too, and hope you'll let us quote from what you send.

One of us works in higher education, and gets a little misty at the beginning of fall semester, when everyone is so earnest and the campus looks so green with possibility. If only Fall didn't also mean college football, which at the university level is as problematic as it is popular. We like what Murray Sperber has to say, in books like Beer and Circus and in essays and speeches made all over the U.S. Not that we're very hopeful for change in our time…

One of us has been in bed this week, experiencing a number of interesting side effects from a medication taken to subdue his gout. Gout is one of the more literary ailments. While not so romanticized as tuberculosis or cancer (and as far as I know never mentioned by Susan Sontag), it has been richly represented in art and fiction, as well as in a number of memoirs. There's a wonderful book about all of this, by the great English medical historian Roy Porter, called The Patrician Malady. We also enjoyed Vatel, which perhaps only we remember as a movie about a man with gout. Though I doubt that's how the movie is generally described.

We went to see a hot air balloon ascent—about 20 balloons attempted the ascent, and only one wasn't able to launch. We were close enough (and had binoculars with us) to see that the gondolas are much smaller than anything I would become airborne in, though I can't speak for both of us. I realized I could not remember if Jules Verne spends much time in Around the World in 80 Days talking about how much work it takes to get a balloon into the air. But Verne isn't on my list of books to reread.

I'm always amazed at people who declare themselves to be rereading Dickens or Thackery or even Jane Austen. I have a list of books, rather, a little notebook full of book titles, that I carry around in case I drop into a library or a used book store, as well as a stack of unread books, actually several stacks in various rooms, that have a stronger call on my reading time than rereading anything. But I do generally pack a collection of George Seferis or Constantine Cavafy when I travel. They're great during any waiting time or just to relax when being on vacation is stressful instead of relaxing. Not that I can read Greek, though that's also on my to-do-someday list.

The other day one of us wrote a post-party thank you note and mailed it off. Today, the friend who gave the party wrote an email (seemingly without ironic intent) saying how wonderful it was to get a handwritten note. We're lucky to have a great stationery store in our downtown (shop local whenever you can!), with good access to commemorative stamps at our local post office, and we make some of our own envelopes (visit our ephemera page to see some samples). We both spend our working life using computer programs, so it's nice to write rather than word process, and we find many of our correspondents are delighted to get real mail as well
as e-mail.

One of us is reading Ulysses online every day, since (am I allowed to admit this and still claim to be a book person?) I never have. This pursuit follows an attempt to read Pepys' diary online, which didn't work for me—maybe because I didn't start at the beginning, or maybe because I wasn't able to get interested enough in Pepys' life and activities. The idea of "page-a-day" web sites (or RSS feeds) is an interesting one.

One of us reviews for the Literary Magazine Review, but we would recommend it even if we didn't have that connection. It's really difficult to learn about small magazines, and LMR is one of the few places we know of where one can learn about a variety of new and established journals. These are real reviews, too, not just promotional blurbs.