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baked beans, cole slaw, broiled franks, Indian Pudding, coffee. We finished up the Bordeaux which had been given to us for the Thanksgiving Feast. 

Susi had her kitten on Friday after Thanksgiving, and it promptly died of malnutrition or exposure, or both...I never did know which, but anyway she brought it into bed with me because the electric blanket was warm, and it died there after about 12 hours of coddling. Needless to say, if it were anyone else, I would probably lift my eyebrows and say well, for a cat some people, etc.

The machine age we live in, complete with taxes extracted before you ever get to see your money, is getting me down. L[[strikethrough]] i [[/strikethrough]] ewis Mumford has a few words on the subject in Technick and Civilization, that is to say, on the development of the machine age, in this considerable tome. I read part of it traveling back and forth on the street car, but couldn't conquer it before it was due back at BPL, before we moved. That, and the rest of his series on the nature of man, are some books I want to put on my shelf before I die. He seems, in his current writings, to combine a certain amount of intellectual fodder with statistics in a useful way...useful, that is, to people who have an interest, but no time, or facilities, or business, or all three, probing into the implications of the presently-building modern slum projects: The Stuyvesant Villages, and the ilk. Granted, these are mainly fact-y, they have aroused interest enough to have elicited responses from the sponsors of the projects, Robert Moses, for one. All of these gems have appeared in the New Yorker during the past several years.

Rachel Carson's The Sea Around Us, if you haven't read it, while it may contain nothing new for you, who are exposed to things natural, is definitive fact, readably presented. It is a response, I feel, to the plea put forth in The American Scholar (or whatever the Phi Bete publication is called) by the president of that that society, for better style in dissertations and treatises.