I've been really throwing myself into baseball/softball (pun absolutely intended). Playing, watching, reading. I feel a bit like Bart Giamatti: On the bright side, I also learned to type on a German keyboard, and I've had time to discover what I like to call small films of quiet beauty. The list for now: Submarine (2011) Absolute Giganten (1999) Temporada de Caza (2017) LuTo (2015) Lost in Translation (2003) Paterson (2016) It's amazingly satisfying to come home from a long day at work and lose yourself in a small, quiet, beautiful world. Sometimes it's also a good reminder of how small, quiet, and beautiful our world can be. Or at least a decent alternative to the bar, when I'm not feeling particularly social. -- Weren't there rumblings a few weeks ago about 3-4 of us being in SW Germany? I know Cumol and I are studying here, but I feel like there was at least one other person that expressed interest in a meetup. I'm bored in the semester break; who wants to come to Freiburg? (Or meet us in Heidelberg, or Stuttgart or wherever.)Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the game's deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight. I wrote a few things this last summer, this summer that did not last, nothing grand but some things, and yet that work was just camouflage. The real activity was done with the radio--not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television--and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come.