Yes, it’s one of those blogging trends, but I like this exercise. It takes some thinking. 1. Read more than 150 pages of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, and really, really enjoyed it. 2. Sent the majority of my phone-text messages during the last year in my third language. 3. Gotten lost in a slum in Agra at night. 4. Lost the ability to speak my second language, which at one point I could at least use passably in the workplace, through disuse. 5. Gone without any sleep for 72 hours (and only about 6 hours during 6 days) while copying …

[Why cannot we say “these nights” as we do “these days”, to mean “lately”? I suppose it’s because technically, day can mean daytime, or it can include both daytime and night time, meaning full days of 24 hour stretches. But you would think that it would be possible, for when one talks of nighttime phenomena, to say instead “these nights”. Have you read Greg Egan’s novel, Quarantine? It’s an early work, and not as fully developed as later works, but it does have one thing that blew me away, and which has come to mind lately, whenever I go outside …