I'm in Rehoboth Beach, in an internet cafe, sitting with legs crossed on a black bean-bag chair, typing into my laptop on the floor. Lot's of young folks here, some from Poland--maybe all from Poland. They all seem to be speaking Polish anyway. The guy at the front desk might be German; he seemed to have a German accent and he wasn't speaking Polish to the Polish people. I must have gone through a black hole and ended up in Europe. If so, I'll have to come back here next time I want to get to Europe and can't afford the air fare.
I'm just in town for a couple hours, to check email, etc. I'm staying with my friend Leslie at a lovely, big house at Broadkill Beach, about 12 miles up the road. The house is an off-season rental, friends of Leslie's. It's on the Chesapeake Bay, not far from where the bay meets the ocean (the water is salty); the house is right across the street. Once again I've lived up to my last name--Byrne--and spent five minutes in the sun today, which is always enough to get me a little sun-burn. It'll probably fade by tomorrow.
I'm on a kind of working retreat. I thought getting away from the city would help me get on track re: all the reading I have to do for my comps. I did do a lot of reading today. My system so far is this: read at the house in the morning, then go to the beach and read there (and swim of course); after lunch, read at the house, then maybe take a nap, and then go back to the beach around 5 or 6, swim a little more; then back to the house for dinner and maybe more reading, or making music, or maybe watching a DVD--or go to Rehoboth to find an internet cafe...
More on my "system": I've been reading secondary sources at the house, primary sources at the beach. I couldn't imagine reading about the Romantics' reception anxiety (secondary) at the beach, but essays by William Hazlitt (primary) seemed appropriate. I'm sure it was what all the fashionable people read on holiday in 1825...
I've been giving Leslie a running commentary on the Romantics and she isn't bored stiff--which is a good sign (today while we were swimming I told her about Dorothy Wordsworth's gossip about Coleridge--how supposedly the opium he was taking made him a lousy lover and gave him sagging breasts...).
That, and the beach, probably made me think that I should be reading "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," which is on my list. I'm going to download that now and read it at the house (even though it's a primary source, not a secondary, and thus violated my day-old system. Even I'm not reckless enough to bring a laptop to the beach so it could get filled with sand or carried out by the tide into the ocean).
"Albatross!"
Posted by jeb at September 13, 2005 10:16 PM | TrackBack