It’s been a long week Au Pays De Miette, signified, I suppose, by the fact that we’ve gone quite a few days without a new podcast. And to complicate things, I’ve just posted a new one which, like the Fante or the Murdoch or the Dostoevsky, is close to my cuffs.

I wonder if there’s anybody who can read into a podcastophone and take dictation of his or her inner monologue simultaneously. I can’t, much to my own absolute dismay. If I could, the past half hour would have been written up this way:

I dreamt last night that I was a reluctant part of some Truman Showy podcasting reality television show, forced to read literature into one of those cellphone hands-free microphones round-the-clock from a text that was projected onto the insides of my eyelids, with the occasional pauses in my reading at chapter breaks to sip coffee or talk to people or, you know, to breathe and stuff.

A secret: Endurance Reading is nothing new for Miette. She’s participated in marathon readings of epic Greek poetry, she stays up on Bloomsday and reads along, she reads you Dostoevsky five straight nights, no sweat off her permanently furrowed brow, not your Miette, no how.

On a walk this afternoon, I spotted curbside an abandoned 1972 volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, volume 4 (BOTHA TO CARTHAGE!!) which somehow mysteriously made its way from its landfill destiny to my grubby paw and later, to a treasured position on my mantle (or my world’s equivalent of a mantle… equally special. Mantleworthy)

Quite possibly the quietest, most listless, bottomless podcast of Kerouac you’ve ever experienced, this. Possibly? Quite possibly. But not without due charm on its own, and intent at that! For listen: do you hear the passing buses in the background, the motorcycles, the car horns, the screaming pedestrians?