adeste fideles

I'm staying with my mother in Silver Spring for a few weeks and have agreed to do an informal event at Politics & Prose down in DC on Sunday, January 6, at 6 pm. 

P&P is at 5015 Connecticut Avenue, NW, which is just by the intersection of Connecticut and Nebraska.  The event will be a sort of get-together downstairs in the Den café - not a formal signing or reading, just a chance to talk about books or whatever else occurs to us.  The link to details on the P&P website is here.

The events coordinator (Jonathan Woollen) and I are also trying to work out a way to distribute largesse.  I am trying to clear books from my mother's garage and guest bedroom - there are foreign editions of The Last Samurai dating back to 2000-2002 (!), books I brought to New York for a residency in 2003 which never managed to get taken back to Europe, books bought at college, books bought as a graduate student, books bought on visits to the US . . . My idea at the moment is that anyone who buys a book at P&P (not necessarily by me) should have a souvenir book for free.  (We may refine this closer to the day.)

I suppose this all does mean I must grapple with updating my website (the horror), but now my mother and I must go to lunch.

Torments

People who at once start talking 19 to the dozen are exasperating. Just consider those documentary films about animals, in which those young, good-looking commentators say something which doesn't have anything to do with an answer. This is actually meaningless, because things are just being read off and because the spokeswoman has never seen the animal.  This is one of my chief torments.

Gadamer, interviewed by Hans Ulrich Obrist in May 2000 (Interviews 1)