"There is also a peculiar effect whereby different books read by the same narrator can seem to agglutinate into a single mongrel super-book."

"The audiobooks of Norman Mailer’s 'Miami and the Siege of Chicago,' Steven Pinker’s 'The Sense of Style,' and Nabokov’s epic 'Ada' are all read by Arthur Morey, and I’ve begun to hear his circumspect and world-weary enunciation meld into an imaginary work in which the 1968 Republican convention is satirized between bouts of hectoring the reader about sentence construction, all in Nabokov’s wildly over-frosted late prose. Many of my beloved science-fiction audiobooks are read by Robertson Dean, whose voice sounds like a glob of pomegranate molasses falling off the edge of a spoon. It’s a good fit for techy near-future dystopias, at once hal-ishly flat and resonantly mellow, saying things like, '[she] lay staring up at a dim anamorphic view of the repeated insectoid cartouche' (that’s from William Gibson’s 'Zero History')."

Writes Paul Grimstad, in "Confessions of an Audiobook Addict/It’s both strange and enlightening to move through the world with an author’s voice filling your ears" (The New Yorker).

"A perpetual stew, also known as hunter's pot or hunter's stew, is a pot into which whatever one can find is placed and cooked. The pot is never or rarely emptied all the way..."

"... and ingredients and liquid are replenished as necessary. The concept is often a common element in descriptions of medieval inns. Foods prepared in a perpetual stew have been described as being flavorful due to the manner in which the ingredients blend together, in which the flavor may improve with age.... Wattana Panich restaurant in Bangkok, Thailand, has continued to maintain the broth from the same perpetual stew for over 47 years.... William Gibson references a perpetual stew served on the Bridge in his novel Idoru.... Danny Devito, as the character Frank Reynolds, references a perpetual stew served to and from his Vietnamese sweatshop workers in the TV show It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia." 

From the Wikipedia article "Perpetual stew," which I'm thinking about this morning... after the Senate voted to allow witnesses at the Trump trial and I think I overheard from the TV that I am not watching that the trial could go on for months. Months? Why not years? Why should it ever end? Keep it seething and quietly simmering forever! Why end it and only create the need to start anew with a third impeachment, a fourth impeachment, a fifth impeachment? Just keep this impeachment going, now and forever, one and inseparable...

I'm curious enough about the William Gibson reference that I bought the Kindle version so I could search for it. Alas! There's only one "soup" in the book and that's not it. No "stew," no "potage," no "chowder"... Yes, I can read the book, I know.... and, of course, that's a better use of my time than watching the pot.

UPDATE: "House managers drop call for witnesses after Trump lawyers agree to admit Herrera Beutler’s claims" (NYT). Read that headline carefully. It doesn't mean that the lawyers admit HB's claims are true, just that they agree that her statement can be admitted as evidence. The statement is that Kevin McCarthy said that — while the riot was ongoing — Trump said over the telephone that the rioters were "more upset" about the election than McCarthy was.