Category: Books
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Abandoning responsibility
No problems with my liver, and my blood counts were absurdly good (697 T-cells – literally the highest number I’ve ever had, in fifteen or more years of testing them), so the weakness I’ve experienced (plus all the usual gastro problems) the past two or three days must all be ‘transitional’ side effects. What’s been…
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Against junk; and a small panic
I’m bothered by the amount of junk in my life – by which I don’t mean anything that Bukowski or Burroughs would talk about – but more like what’s meant by junk mail, junk television… junk yard dogs. Well not exactly that last one, but you know what I’m saying. Over the years my reading…
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Anti-Goethe
Reading, for fun (yes, I should be editing those articles instead), between sneezes (I still have a cold), Beerbohm’s wonderful essay ‘Quia imperfectum’ (1918) from And Even Now. Far funnier and more charming than one would expect, given the topic – which purports at first to be unfinished artworks, but which ends up being Goethe.…
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Failed
Last night I saw A Scanner Darkly, which was quite wonderful. On my way out, I bumped into Jonathan, the handsome and successful young doctor who has helped me on some of the HIV presentations, who was headed into another movie; I was in enough of a daze that it was actually rather difficult to…
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Fragments and overview
At 2:30 am, my smoke alarm goes off. There’s no battery in it, there’s no smoke, it just malfunctions. Somewhere in what I’d watched that day were the bleakly sunny rooms of an everyday Los Angeles apartment, with all its implied background – that strange flatness, that subtly disturbing sense of endless emptiness that is…
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Solaris
Continued light-headed, or perhaps woozy, all afternoon. Didn’t go to Catherine’s birthday dinner. Did go in for interview with prospective postgraduate – and I’m sorry if it sounds heartless, but what a waste of time that was. Well I suppose that in the larger sense, as I gave her advice about where she should consider…
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Abasement of the Northmores
After a rather disappointing day, where I just sort of maintained cruising speed – didn’t really do much useful, but didn’t stop completely – it is now late at night, when I should be sleeping (as I can’t sleep in tomorrow, because I have a doctor’s appointment in the morning). But I am not sleepy……
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Bookshelf
Enjoying Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf. He has a slightly unexpected style – very educated, articulate, intelligent – but at the same time rather stiff, with not infrequent falls into gracelessness. Perhaps it’s just because he is a design engineer, who has become fascinated with books. I get the sense that he sometimes…
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Indulgences
No, not Catholic ones. (Always amusing to note: although my father was brought up Catholic, and my mother Orthodox, they got married and became Presbyterian – which here, close to Scotland, is a tale that brings in a lot of incredulous looks. I suspect they want to know: why on earth would one become Presbyterian…
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Secrets
Read today Gaiman’s Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr Punch – quite wonderful. I know that in becoming a Neil Gaiman fan, I’m jumping onto a very large bandwagon, and doing so pretty late in the day – but this one was really a surprise: a slow, dense, atmospheric tour of the shadows and…
Paul Attinello 