my nearly two hour long conversation with benjamin this evening cut mightily into my blogging time, which is dangerously becoming a late-nite ritual these days. so did reading a few more chapters of my book. but that's cool. i really won't write long this time, because i have a busy weekend ahead of me.

of note today: we rigged up, rather comically, a mic to the speaker phone (requiring three xlr cables to run downstairs to the office) in order to record a phoned-in verse by shiffai, as well as (unbeknownst to shif) a good fifteen minutes worth of conversation between him and benny, in wolof and english, some of which will hopefully make it onto the album as skits.

not a whole lot of other work got done (except dan mowed the lawn and i cleaned up doggy doo after him.) the lerock brothers made some long term plans, including brainstorming urls (jamrec, jaamrec, jaamrekk, africanhiphop, africanrap, senegalhiphop, senerap - some of them are taken, some aren't, and i guess you'll just have to find out for yourself.)

i didn't eat all day until around 9:30, after a series of only semi-comical snafus involving automobiles, when we finally got to a place, celebrity pizza (clam roll, terrifically light onion rings, and a mint chip frappe emblifying the not-particularly-healthy turn my diet has taken for parts of this summer), en route to shopping for the bbq and back home in plenty of time for me to sew up the ebay auction i'd been lurking and intended to make a last minute pounce on.

i lie on the couch reading my book, and occasionally glance over at the cd player spinning out the x-press 2 album, slightly miffed and surprised to see that there isn't a wild raving house party going on over there, it's just the living room.

apropos of that (the reading part), here are:

some things about my trip to cape cod (but not a lot, because i'm going to bed soon):

what was i reading? well, i finished the borges. that's right, the entire corpus of his ficciones, two summer's worth of work and wonder (i feel like i've already written this, but i guess that's jlb for you.) my next major fiction undertaking was to be John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (which would be my fourth novel of his in near-chronological sequence.) i started it, but after 100 pages decided it was stupid. perhaps another time.

for much of the trip i paced leisurely through another barth(es), roland, whose charming and idiosyncratic Empire of Signs was an excellent holiday gift from Alyssa a few months back. I actually started it in new york, and i'm not quite down yet. but it's a good book to read in little increments. it's a good book to read in general, being on the one hand beautifully written and eloquent and on the other hand quite ridiculous in the quaint way that semiotics is. it makes me want to go back and read mythologies again sometime.

another book, the one i was referring to earlier, is Word Freak. i'm reading it. i'm not going to write about it now because i've been telling a lot of people about it already. it's ruth's copy, and i started it on the cape after becca finished with it.

okay, let's get through day two of the trip: we got up late, went to a different beach, swim and sun and sand blah blah blah yay! we had dinner with jane and cousin julia and her nearly-five-year old rapscallion/sweetfaced/entymologicrazy impossibly adorable little feller of a son, mason. more about him later. i got the most expensive dinner, despite trying not to, since we all paid for ourselves. then, taffy and seashells and drive to wellfleet. i read a book to mason on the way.

these three cubic feet
of bone and blood and meat
are all i love and know