The new kid

Well, it looks like I need a new place to read. Bewley's is going to work out as a job, but not as both a job and a place to hang out and read. I think the difference, that is, why I could hang out at Barracuda's and not at Bewley's is that Barracuda's was a job mostly for fun. Not only that, but I was genuinely invested in the coffee and the drinks that I made. Bewley's, on the other hand, I don't really care about. Maybe just "not yet," but some of the details of the espresso were lost in the pounding-out of drink orders. I could bore you with details and rants of over-extracted shots, but really?

Luckily, I stopped by The Cheese Pantry, just near my house, and so I'll have to give that a trial. Good soups, not good coffee. But, know what? I don't care about the coffee. I finished Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, my mother's favorite book, and it got me thinking about migration in literature. In other words, not literature as "quest," because I believe that is over-generalized--it is not all about the Odyssey--but rather as migration, a search for the self within the turmoil of change. So, while it's not my new favorite book, it's a good read; plunge through it.

This is turning into a book blog, because I have no friends in this country. I started the novel Watt by Samuel Beckett last night. Unexpectedly funny, and more readable than his later works. It was written just before Waiting for Godot, and is one of his last pieces of writing in English. As the back cover says, it is distinctively Irish. Really, that's why I bought it. I know next to nothing about Beckett's novels, but bought it because I wanted something untranslated and explicitly Irish.

It has given me some good quotes, so far. Mainly two I would like to share. First, the middle of section one: "But he being what he has become, and the place being what it was made, the fit is perfect." As an internal monologue of Watt's, this shows some very subtle yet profound insight into his mind. I'm not sure I would put it in the realm of Calvanist predestination, but maybe closer to the Zen-like (I'm guessing; I'm not a very Zen-like person) acceptance of whatever is, simply for the sake that it is. Second, the end of section one: "...of the new day at last, the day without precedent at last." Such fantastic wordplay. New, without precedent. Okay, enough. I miss writing essays. Could you guess?