back into it

Fortunately I had a call from a friend who needed a climbing fix before she heads back to the simmering southeastern states for a family visit. Getting up even on plastic holds is restorative.
It got to 90 yesterday, wilting just about everyone, and today promises more. We think the cat has found some kind of ditch-out place in which to lay low; he doesn't cotton to being wetted down, which would offer him relief.
Finished Fitzgerald's translation of Virgil's Aenead; while reading the pages of lines detailing the horror of battle, I wondered how the person singing it could put this violence into song. The narrator, in fact, beseeches the Muses to help him do so several times. The version of "Hamlet" which we saw had a troupe of "playas" who actually rapped some ancient lines to prove their mettle for performance. It was completely effective to my ears, and I linked it to the epic I was reading; hip hop or rap is a good fit for lines and lines of ancient poetry. The violence is universal and timeless.
New work underway: Rory Stewart's The Places in Between, about his walk across Afghanistan.