I dreamed of taking a transcontinental train with as little difficulty as traveling to D.C., which I am not convinced has been the state of American rail for decades. Otherwise since my sleep has gone principally to hell again, I feel burnt and friable and past my last fingernail of whatever I am supposed to be doing. On the one hand we are a communal species; on the other I would like to feel I had any right to exist beyond what other people require of me.

I am relieved to see that the enraging article I read last night about the deep-sixing of Yiddish at Brandeis has since been amended to a reduced but not eradicated schedule, but it would have been best to leave the program undisturbed to begin with. The golem reference is apropos.

My formative Joan D. Vinge was Psion (1982/2007), which even in its bowdlerized YA version may have been my introductory super-corporatized dystopia, but I had recent occasion to recommend her Heaven Chronicles (1991), which I got off my parents' shelves in high school and whose first novella especially has retained its importance over the years, of holding on to the true things—like one another—even in the face of an apparently guaranteed dead-end future, the immutably cold equations of its chamber space opera which differ not all that much from the hot ones of our planetside reality show. Not Pyrrhically or ironically, it chimed with other stories I had grown up hearing.

Jamaica Run (1953) is an inexplicably lackadaisical film for such sensational components as sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation climactically burning down on Caribbean Gothic schedule, but it did cheer me that it unerringly cast Wendell Corey as my obvious favorite character, the heroine's ne'er-do-well brother whose landed airs don't cover his bar tab and whose intentions toward the ingenue of a newly discovered heir may be self-surprised sincere romance or just hunting his own former fortune, swanning around afternoons in a dressing gown and getting away with most of the screenplay's sarcasm: "What is this, open house for disagreeable people?"

I cannot yet produce photographic evidence, but the robin's eggs in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen have hatched into open-mouthed nestlings. A dozen infant caterpillars are tunneling busily through the milkweed.