Off the Cliff

Succeded in cutting down a swath of the creepers out back and inflicting some damage on the mulberry that's trying to take over the AC compressor, but clearly I need to rake up the leaves that have fallen from the cherry tree. A nuisance, because stoop labour hurts, dammit. Have been looking at ads for back braces but I *have* back braces, they just don't brace enough. Will core strengthening ever have an efffect?

We're getting the brocade effect on the trees now, and about time. The maples in particular decided to turn red about three days before they began to fall. My poor  physio booked a bus tour of the fall colours up north a fortnight or so ago, and there was nothing to see.

That Guardian article about Horrible Histories has me ear-wormed now, because I was so taken with faux-Simon and Garfunkel singing the praises of the kinder gentler Vikings that I watched it about five times. And of course it referenced one of my two favourite codas of all time, so now the mental muzak is playing The Boxer nonstop. (The other one is Layla, of course.) Must admit I've lost my ear for Brit accents because I couldn't make out the lyrics of anything else the article linked to, and especially not Rowan Atkinson's Henry 8.

The minor drawbacks of living in the future include informing people who automatically debit your credit card that you have a new one with differing expiry dates etc. And especially when one of them is Patreon which has the most useless and infuriating webpages imaginable, starting with their Login page not giving you a login option.

Not that I've activated my new card yet because my old one doesn't expire until October, and I want to get the 'beginning of month' charges out of the way first. But then I'll have to trundle down to Rogers and let them deal with updating my phone plan, and somehow figure out how to deal with Squaredle. Possibly by getting a new plan.

Blood draw finally happened Friday so I'm fine till the end of December.

The light these days is autumnal even if the humidices are August. But a 22C / low 70s with a breeze isn't the same as a breezeless 27. So I'm quite comfortable in a tshirt for the present. Went out and had Eggs Bennie on a patio this afternoon, with blue skies and very white clouds, until the grey clouds moved in and the landscape became autumnal indeed.

Unruly, about the monarchs of England, makes for very dispiriting reading. That might just be that Mitchell doesn't think much of kings in general, but equally it could be that those were nasty times period, in which a king could be effective and bloody, or ineffective and bloody-- if only in the wars caused by various rebellions against him-- but nothing else, given the way things were settled back then. "Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see."

In spite of rain, the temps have been warmer than average. Thus the little brown knots on the cherry tree from yesterday have turned into little green buds this morning, and green mists the thin branches of Prof Islamic Studies' apple tree, and even the diminutive tulip tree next door is bravely putting out, well, something.

Mild nuisances dep't: I bought an electric can opener, the kind that runs on batteries, because my hands can no longer cope with the manual kind. Many five star reviews, works like a dream, etc etc. Should have read the one stars that said 'there's no gap between the two cogs to insert the can edge into' because, guess what, there's no gap between the cogs to insert the can edge into. Good thing it wasn't expensive. But now must hoof it over to Wiener's hardware to consult the oyaji there and make sure I get one that works. The other thing I need is a new air purifier because the motor on mine begins to wheeze and is not long for this world. Cannot buy online because they're all advertised as whisper quiet and I want one that makes white noise. The air purifier function is secondary and, in the current beast, not terribly functional at all.

The most interesting essay in Mary Beard's book is actually the one about Astérix. She suggests that the reason Astérix isn't as popular in America as in Europe is that the new world doesn't have the legacy of the Romans engrained in its cultural DNA, nor is there a subconscious memory of resistance to an invader that gets pinged by the small Gaulish village holding out against Jules César. Me, I never thought resistance to the Romans was the main theme of Astérix. I mean, yes of course they do, but that's just the settei. The real point, I thought, was the wordplay and the puns and taking the mickey out of national stereotypes. That's why I prefer the French originals. The English translations may be inspired but I appreciate their cleverness as translations, not as original wit. But then in some ways I may be closer to my French and English roots than yer average sixth generation whatever. But I also think it's Beard's bias to think that the Romans are so terribly terribly important to modern Europeans (and yes that includes the English.) Sure, their remnants are everywhere, but the remnants are part of the now, not a reminder of the then. Like cathedrals, like temples in Japan: yeah, they've been standing for centuries if not millennia, but they're part of the modern world now-- sitting next to subways and, in Japan, high rises, because that's how the present works.

Snow tomorrow, whoopee. A touch more seasonable than the 20C of last week and I wasn't going anywhere anyway. Hope it's not much because I certainly can't shovel it. The recycle didn't make it out yesterday either, and it was my four week accumulation. But I ordered in yesterday evening, two full items from a Vietnamese place,  that will provide six meals the way I eat now.

Have been reading A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, popular history of the bloodthirsty Romans, and also rereading Marcus Corvinus who isn't as horrible as the horrible people in A Fatal Thing. Possibly the horrors of the emperors are filtered through biased sources, but it was unarguably a slave state which cannot fail of being horrible. Corvinus and his bought help notwithstanding. It's not stated outright but he has far more slaves than the ones that get named-- nameless skivvies and lots of them‐ whose existence he doesn't register at all.

One must move to move,of course, but an achy joint day might not be the best time to wash my stairs, given that the elbows wouldn't grease. But they're slightly cleaner than before, and I wasn't up for the task of vacuuming the downstairs and washing the kitchen floor. Also hung up my orange shirt for September's Every Child Counts, only a third of the way through, and wasn't that an undertaking. I can't reach the porch hooks without a step stool and I was fine in June hanging up my Pride flag on its rod but today, holding a shirt on a hanger, I was all wibble wobble I'm-going-to-fall. I hope that was just fallout from yesterday's gardening, sweeping a bag full of linden whatevers from the front walk, because bending down repetitively stiffens the hamstrings something chronic. But otherwise I must believe I've actually lost strength in my legs.

Did a laundry,  mended the strap on one of my shopping bags, and otherwise sat  on the sofa with grateful beanbags warming my poor poor lumbar area and read M. Didius Falco in Germany. Made the mistake of looking up Varus' legions which led me down the rabbit hole of early imperial Roman politics which led to the usual revulsion that Rome has always induced in me ever since my mother gave me I, Claudius to read at an early age. (Really, what was she thinking of?) Horrible horrible people: almost worse than imperial China which lord knows is bad enough. I never could understand why people wanted to be emperor of either, or wanted their sons to be,  if female. Had a prof in uni for Drama to 1642 who was entranced by Marlowe's Tamburlaine and besotted by the speech that ends 'The sweet fulfillment of an earthly crown.' And couldn't for the life of him understand the jaded looks his students gave him as he warbled on. I ventured to suggest that we'd had sufficient experience of power-hungry rulers in recent history to not think much of the breed. Our prof, who'd actually lived through the war, thought that was piffle. Ah well. Some people have the power virus and some, luckily, don't.

My sister had her hip replacement scheduled to just before Christmas, then had it rescheduled to Sept 25 and now has had it sudenly rescheduled to this coming Friday. Which as she says is good to get it over with, and she has her church friends to rely on, but there's such a thing as kokoro no junbi/ being in the right mindset, which no doctor and especially no surgeon has ever heard of.

The Sibyl in Her Grave was really really good, quite the best of the Hiary Tamars by me. It features as well what I think of as anti-Dick Francis characters: those poor hapless English souls who simply can't say no or enforce what we today call boundaries. Whereas Francis is full of out and out bullies and harpies who have never heard of the rules and ride roughshod over everyone's boundaries as if they don’t exist. And not all of them are the arrogant rich, though of course some are. But the rest are just unpleasant people who probably cut in line, which I believe is supposed to be the English sin that cries aloud to heaven for vengeance. Though of course no one says anything when they do.

The mug of the past few days blew away finally as I was out spending money in restaurants, so I walked over to the subway to see what progress has been made on installing the elevator. Damned little. Signs say project will be finished by the end of 2024. I can still subway back to Christie because it has up escalators, supposing them to be in operation and not closed off for cleaning. But there's no way down with a walker unless one wants to rely on the kindness of strangers, always a dicey proposition. And I'm convinced I'll be using this walker to the end of my life. Though I should recall that I didn't walk for years after that cyst and my legs consequently stayed weak just as long. But neither did everything else hurt as much as it does now.

My sister finally has a date for her hip replacement. Alas, it's just before Christmas. I am not impressed by her hospital, nor by the rehab centre she'll probably go to. Which was well enough in the day, but seems to have had a falling off since covid. My dentist had horror stories of her 90-some year old aunt not being allowed to walk around post-knee surgery because the staff thought she might fall, so she got 30 minutes of exercise a day, period. But I say nothing; it is what it is. Luckily S has all her church friends as well as good up and downstairs neighbours.

Bro and s-i-l are in Stratford. S-i-l was mightily unimpressedby their production of Richard II, which I understand rather plays up Richard's (dubious IMO) rep as one of what was known in my day as the faggot kings of England. It's no use them trying to appeal to any audience but Boomers because no one else can afford their prices, and come to that, neither can this Boomer. 

Yesterday was a total write-off, not only because it was raining but because my right side everything went sproing and I could barely move. Hip flexors and glutes, mainly, which sometimes complain but not like this. So it was beanbags and muscle relaxants all day, meaning I dozed periodically and finished Mr. Currelly furnishing his museum with a lot of coincidental luck and a lot of wealthy friends. Pirate Bishop White didn't turn up until page 245. Currelly admires Pirate Bishop White who, he says, once held off not one but two Chinese warlords intent on sacking the town of which he was bishop. This might or might not be true. I mean, Currelly also believes the story that it was Armenian activists intent on bringing down the Turkish government that started the Armenian genocide.

One can't expect someone born in the 19th century to question whether it's a good thing to amass goods from other cultures for the edification of one's own, but at least he thought it was for edification: since people can't go to China to see how wonderful Chinese culture is, we'll bring Chinese culture here. Sacking of summer palaces aside, at least some of the works he brought here were sold by mandarins anxious to raise cash to get them the hell away from the warlords. Others-- like the famed Buddhist reliefs-- were sold by starving monks whose food had been confiscated by said warlords. So you might argue for some sense of preservation there.

Today was some better, after vigorous stretching and rolling on foam rollers and tennis balls, enough that I walked to acupuncture and back, which was probably a bad idea. Also wrote out a holograph will on a form that I bought decades ago, since the dates all start 19. But now I need two witnesses to sign in my presence and each other's, which is a slight nuisance since people come to my house in singletons and it's not that easy going to my neighbours'. Requires going up steps. However, I suppose I can manage it. I also seem to recall, from my younger brother's law classes, that holograph wills with no witnesses have been admitted to probate, like the guy who died out in the wilderness and wrote 'all to Minnie' on his shirt before doing so. And of course, one hopes it won't be needed in the near future.

And then there's the cozy comfort of the latest 100 Demons, to which I shall return shortly.

Discover by accident ie poking around menues which evidently is how you're supposed to find techy things out, that the command to kill images is located in Chrome's privacy settings, which OK fine. But this allows me to scratch an itch of half a century's standing. The Egyptian Unknown Prince aka the Screaming Prince (whose corpse I have no desire to view thank you very much) has been identified as the parricidal son of Ramses III who managed to off himself while undergoing interrogation about same. The Turin Judicial papyrus says he was left alone, presumably in the Egyptian equivalent of the library with a pistol containing a single bullet, and was then found dead: possibly because you don't execute princes however unnatural. That might explain the oddities of his burial. Like, he murdered his father so yes we embalm his body, but not in the usual way, and we wrap his mummy in a sheepskin which is considered unclean, and then... we put him in a royal tomb? that gets robbed like all the royal tombs, so his body gets gathered up  along with a whole buncha pharaohs and put in one of the mass reburials of later times. Which is, again, OK fine. But at least he's no longer unknown.

Tooth has calmed down nicely but it seems I no longer bounce back from 90 minute dental procedures. Napped yesterday, slept like log last night, want to nap today. And hurt all over, which could equally be early spring sudden pressure/ temperature changes. The wind that was banging about yesterday and blowing in monsoon rains continues to bang about today, blowing in a cold front. Yawn yawn.

Everyone else's life is being so traumatic just now that I'm trying to be grateful that the only thing bothering me is that the plumber somehow got my metal shower hose twisted about in such away that the shower head won't stay facing out, as it has for the last fifteen years, but wants to turn its face to the wall, thereby rendering it useless as a shower. I've fixed it in place with electrician's tape so it now functions just fine as a shower but can't be used to wash the under bits that showers don't reach. This is why we can't have nice things.

Clearly I was stressed about the plumber because today my system decided to rebel against, oh I don't know, could be any one of several things it's been known to rebel against: pad thai or Johnson cocktail or peanuts or wine or some combination of same. Which is fine. I need to stop the daily gin even if I hurt so much without it. Put braces on elbows and curl up under the quilts with bean bags.

As for reading Wednesday-

Finished?

Duckworth, Carolingian Portraits
-- deadly deadly history: doctrinal disputes* and internecine backstabbing. Enlivened only slightly by the Charles and Camilla saga of Lothair II and his wife and his mistress. Wife was in fact twice widowed before marrying him, he'd already had several kids with his mistress, wife couldn't have kids, Lothair tried for an annulment or a divorce such as several of his relatives had indulged in, most notably his great-grandfather Charlemagne, but his uncles and his uncles' tame churchmen (Hincmar, who does not come across to me as the shining light Duckworth thinks him) were having none of it. The fact that Lothair had no legitimate heir was exactly as his wicked uncles liked it: 'more land for us!!' Empire fell apart because the Carolingians couldn't stop coveting their brothers' territory long enough to put up a united front against the Vikings, the Magyars, the Saracens, the you name it.

*I have always maintained that you can't argue theology in Latin because Latin is just too damned vague, and several of these disputes prove my point. You have to argue in Greek, which at least has articles, but once you start arguing in Greek there's literally no end to it.

Reading now?

The Woman in White showed up in a crossword puzzle the other day and I thought, in my loose-ended fashion, that it might prove diverting. Alas, I'm not particularly diverted, except by the pencilled marginalia some appreciative previous owner has added, admiring Collins' more purple passages.

I tried rereading Neverwhere and I tried rereading The Napoleon of Notting Hill , but I'm in a 'man delights not me nor woman neither' mood, and both Gaiman and Chesterton are quirky enough to bug me.

Reading next?

Maybe I should reread some of the Pratchetts I've only read once, like Reaper Man or Monstrous Regiment.

Finished Pursuit of the Millennium yesterday, which left me in a scratchy bloody-minded mood. A steady succession of narcissistic megolomaniacs, all of whom preached mass slaughter to their followers, or else wound up slaughtering their followers themselves, and who invariably ended up beheaded or burnt alive after the region's population had been decimated in the wars to get rid of the megalomaniacs. Nobody in their right minds would want to live in northern Europe in the sixteenth century, largely because your life was likely to be brutish and short.

Also no one will behead the current narcissistic megalomaniac, or even impeach him.

More calmly today I started on Belles Saisons: a Colette scrapbook, which is photos of Colette and her circle with biographical tidbits. Glorious days, those. Natalie Barney, Liane de Pougy, Mathilde de Morny... those women had style.

 I must have been channeling zeitgeist, because I was awake at 7 a.m., irrevocably dry-eyed awake a mere six hours after going to bed. To bed, note, not to sleep, because it takes me 45 minutes to fall asleep. So I did double the usual number of exercises and had breakfast at a normal hour. And the day's Event passed off without fuss. I'm not used to living in Normal any more. It feels most peculiar. And of course, it's only superficially normal. Abnormal is still around, still screaming that their führer wuz robbed. But for now, some things are getting yanked back on track.

Finished?

Raverat, Period Piece
-- growing up in Cambridge in the 1890s. And whatever was happening in the haute and demi monde, Raverat (née Darwin) makes it clear to me that the middle classes were still bound by a stifling puritanism. Maybe not the Darwin sons, per se, but their wives, yes indeed.

Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and other travel sketches
-- now must go look at another translation to see what his poems really say, because Yuasa's four line expansions really annoy me.

Reading now?

Coupla doorstoppers as a months-long reading project

Montaigne, Essays, and Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium

Sacks, Hallucinations
-- because an acrostic I did was an excerpt in which he once saw the colour indigo in the Egyptian collection at the Met as a result of hearing Monteverdi there, but never saw it again. Sacks is an easy author: goes down easily, even on a tablet

Kipling, A Selection of His Stories and Poems
-- vol 2, bought 2nd hand years back. I've probably read at least half of these before but he's good dipping reading. Though not nearly as easy as Sacks.

Next?

I think I have enough to be going on with.

There's a down side to the kanji study, which is that I start to review them in my head as I'm falling asleep, and then get wound up because I can't remember the radical of one I reviewed today, or the reading or the meaning. I can look them up on my phone in the dark but the wp is like molasses, and if- as is invariably the case- I misremember any of the foregoing it's an exercise in extreme frustration. Mogi no gi 擬, not benshou no shou 償. And so on.

Finished?

A Hazel Holt mystery. Somehow felt I needed the next one, and because the library didn't have it I ordered it from Indigo. I now have my credit card number memorized and must seriously stop using it.

El Cid from Medieval Epics. Tells me no more than the recap in Medieval Myths but is a lot bloodier. Have put ME back on the shelf because I'm not in the mood to do this all over again with Roland and Siegfrid. Though reading the introduction to Roland I find there's a bit of a mystery to Roncevaux. Roland died, not in a battle against 400,000 Sarcens, but in  an attack on Charlemagne's rearguard by Basque warriors as he returned from a Spanish campaign  against the caliph of Cordoba. On the way back he sacked and burned Basque cities, and the Basques attacked in retaliation. It was a skirmish rather than a pitched battle, that still cost the lives of many nobles and all Charlemagne's booty from his campaign. But why was the baggage train in the rear of the army when it should have been in the middle as was usual? Wikipedia has nothing to say on the subject. Overconfidence, military SNAFU, or simply not knowing the terrain through the mountains, maybe?

Pratchett, Making Money
-- been so long since I read this that I'd totally forgotten the plot. A nice palate cleanser.

Reading now?

The perennial standbys: Muromachi poetry, Claudine, and Kafka. Claudine wears on me. Want to swap her for someone else. Wonder if I still have that French translation of Tanizaki's Manji (Buddhist swastika)? OTOH Tanizaki is as likely to wear on me as Claudine. Oogey writer, that.

Next up?

I have Piranesi but I'm not sure I want to start it in my current scratchy state. Am having a rare attack of missing People, which I will deal with in the usual way, but that takes time.

Found this poem on the blog of someone I no longer follow because, though rather younger than I, they've gone curmudgeonly old: forgetting our glorious Boomer past to carp about People These Days pulling down statues and breaking windows and telling Curmudgeon how he should think which, because he's still a Boomer, he takes exception to. Oh well. At least he finds neat poems:

Crofter

Last thing at night
he steps outside to breathe
the smell of winter.

The stars, so shy in summer,
glare down
from a huge emptiness.

In a huge silence he listens
for small sounds.  His eyes
are filled with friendliness.

What's history to him?
He's an emblem of it
in its pure state.

And proves it.  He goes inside.
The door closes and the light
dies in the window.

Norman MacCaig

Have been reading an ancient paperback, The Medieval Myths, summaries of Beowulf and Roland, Prince Igor and the Cid. But also Peredur, the ur-form of Percival, or possibly the other way around. I thought I'd read the Mabnogion but I must have skipped this one. And it's weird in that very Welsh way that makes Jungians very happy and has the editor of this compilation citing Jessie Weston, that muse of T S Eliot's. That whiff of 19th century anthropology is choking, but the images in Peredur are dreamlike (meaning brilliant and unexplained, not misty) and suggestive of things not graspable. If I were feeling more grounded I'd go back to Tim Powers' Last Call which, Gaiman-like, puts the Fisher King in America. But I'm caught in September Ghost Tide with no infants to counter the unsettling, creeping tendrils of the past, so I won't.

Only you know what? The Fisher King is De Troyes or someone misreading a French source of le roi pécheur  (sinful king) as le roi  pêcheur (fishing king). So the Mabinogion has to be later because it keeps the misreading. If it is a misreading and not what the original, possibly not-Christian source had in the first place. I mean, a wounded fisher king is much more resonant than a wounded sinner, but the latter is much more likely,

So, fifty years ago or so I seem to recall I was sitting at the rather too small bedroom desk that I rarely used (because when I was a kid I did my homework at the dining room table), translating Xenophan's Apology which was the first real Greek text I'd ever worked on. Did I actually see the moon landing? Did someone call me downstairs to come watch? That part I don't remember at all. And for all I know, I might not have been sitting at my desk that day either, because my memories all conflate and can never be trusted.

I'm thinking of memory and its fallacies because I finally finished the first four Severian books and then happily went off to read discussion boards and spoilers about 'how unreliable a narrator is Severian after all'. No one seems to agree, but ohh did the Reddit threads have the whiff of early fandom testosterone. So thanks but no thanks, I shall not be reading the sequels where My Character Becomes God and my narrative becomes a mess. (Checked out The Urth of the New Sun in Bakka and passed up on it because the typeface is uuuuugly. A narrow escape.

Am a bit gakkari, because my first reading of the series left me with an impression of something rare and strange. The SF aspects washed right over me. And now that it turns out to be all multi-universes and time twists and alien intelligences guiding human development and and and, it seems much more mechanical and infinitely less resonant. Sigh. I hate it when people get SF in my fantasy.

So now it's either back to Gideon the Ninth or Tobias Winter, but neither is what I want to take the taste out of my mouth. Shall read something mindless and wait for the heat to break on the weekend.

We had our sunny warm perfumed May day today: sunny after the rain cleared mid-morning and warm until a cold front blew in this afternoon. But I'll take it.

Am relieved that I'm not actually as crippled as I felt all day. Evidently I failed to take my anti-inflams this morning, being engrossed by Postsecret, I guess.

I have a couple of books on the go, inspired by my successful polishing off of The Castle of Otranto yesterday afternoon. Another slim volume to weed from the shelf, Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave. But oh does it drag in comparison to Walpole!

Connolly was one of those between-wars literati who hobnobbed with all the other literati and travelled about with them and stayed at their houses and behaved like Julian Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy: complained constantly, made demands, and left the places he stayed in a mess. All without being able to hold down a job, while sponging off his parents and mentors. Why am I reading him? Because in my naive 20s the literary critics of the time pushed certain English writers at the public and I tried reading them, never understanding what the fuss was about. VS Pritchett, Anthony Powell, Nigel Nicolson, and all the Bloomsburyites. Maybe you had to be English to get the point; or maybe the litcrits were all English males and naturally in tune with that particular zeitgeist. Anyway, Connolly was one of them. and I kept The Unquiet Grave ('a word cycle') thinking I might understand it at some later date. Forty years later I understand it all too well.

The book begins, "The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence." Those who cannot do, pontificate. *Especially* if they've been to Eton and Oxford.

Connolly inveighs against women, especially women who have female friends, because women are always trying to break up other women's marriages from spite against men, when they aren't leaving their own marriages from spite against men. I assume some personal grudge at work here: his first wife left him after seven years of marriage, which had to be from spite and not because he was sponging off both her and her mother. In any case, Connolly feels very very sorry for himself and knows the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Marriage invariably ends in hatred or boredom. Friendship is dead. Yahoos are everywhere. The past was so much better than the present- in Rome under Augustus, in Restoration England, in the eighteenth century- and that's where he sees himself belonging. "Civilization is maintained by very few people in a small number of places, and we need only a few bombs and some prisons to blot it out altogether. The civilized are those who get more out of life than the uncivilized, and for this the uncivilized have not forgiven them." Oh, the jeunesse dorée of a hundred years ago: what an unquestioned sense of superiority and entitlement Eton and Balliol can give a man.

OK, this book was written in during the second world war and Connolly was clearly suffering from depression. But the basically selfish and self-centred nature of the man is everywhere, and one can't help suspecting it to be a large contributing factor.

And of course, he was probably right about how he should belong to another time. The other book I'm reading is Huizinga's The Waning of the Middle Ages (coincidentally, also a book from the 70s that I couldn't parse then but can now, after reading both A Distant Mirror and Magnifico.) Connolly would be out of his depth in periods of high reason like both Augustan ages; he's better suited to the calamitous 14th century of Deschamps:

The poetry of Deschamps is full of petty reviling of life and its inevitable troubles. Happy is he who has no children, for then he can write his masterpiece* babies mean nothing but crying and stench; they give only trouble and anxiety; they have to be clothed, shod, fed... Happy are bachelors, for a man who has an evil wife has a bad time of it, and he who has a good one fears to lose her. In other words, happiness is feared together with misfortune. In old age the poet sees only evil and disgust, a lamentable decline of the body and the mind, ridicule and insipidity. It comes soon, at thirty for a woman, at fifty for a man, and neither lives beyond sixty, for the most part.

I shall think of Connolly as sitting out the Black Death, and maybe his witterings will go down better.

*"There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall" says the man who had no children until twenty years after he wrote that line.

Why can't I tell Danes from Norwegians? They're not at all alike. But first it's Harald Bluetooth, namesake of the wireless device, who I thought was a Norwegian king; and now it's Rasmussen of Eurovision fame, who I thought was a Norwegian singer. And both are Danes, and I shall try to remember that fact. (But if you say Viking to me, I shall think of Norsemen, even if the Anglo-Saxons called them Dene.)

Forgot to mention yesterday that I also finished Jeanette Winterson's Why be happy when you could be normal? on the weekend. It was a birthday present from my brother and I started reading it in January, and it says much about me and Winterson that it took me six months to get through it. It was more accessible than most Winterson, being autobiography, but still... Winterson must be really hot if she could find lovers, plural, even amongst fundamentalist Christians, and even when, as she casually admits, she used to beat them up. 'I thought that was what you were supposed to do,' she says casually. Meh.

Have been hoping for the last five years that Kate Griffin would do something that came up to the mark of the Midnight Mayor series, but she hasn't, either before (Horace Lyle) or since (Stray Souls). Kitty Peck is also something very different and, either because it's July or just because, I found it too Hannibal-ish Grand Guignol for my taste. Someone on someone else's FL said her sticking point was violence against women and rape, and I think I agree. Is why I can't read that staple of the mystery genre, the serial killer of young women. Yes it happens; no it is not entertaining.

(Jack the Ripper has much to answer for. Before that, I seem to recall that mysterious mass murders were of families. But that lacks the necessary sexual thrill.)

Which said, I might have gone on to volume two if the library had it in anything but e-form on its clunky incomprehensible e-form platform. Even with a tablet or (unlikely) an e-reader I can't see me going for it. Pity because it does have its points.

Otherwise, my acupuncture studio has had another flood that will close it down, hopefully *not* for a month as in 2015, because at the end of that month I was a cripple with ramifications that went on for the next two years. With exquisite timing, I rescheduled Thursday's cortisone shot/ knee assessment for two weeks from now, thinking I wouldn't be sufficiently recovered from the current internal shenanigans to make it. Ah well, keep exercising and stretching...

Partly due to half an ativan taken as corrective to a late afternoon Pepsi and the need to be up at Silly a.m. to get a cortisone shot tomorrow. But partly due to superb summer weather: warm in the day with fresh breezes, and dry and cool at night.

The summer poses problems for the philodendron in the east-facing study. Curtains, shutters, shoji, and sheers must all be moved about to exclude the brite painful morning sun and the brite painful mid-day heat. So Phil gets no light at all, and pines. This year I've moved him to the front porch, on the table shielded by the spindly evergreen bushes and the low-hanging linden branches. He seems to flourish well enough there, but if he looks wan again I'll move him back inside to the study and stick another philodendron outside.

The new tile in the hallway may stick up a little in the places it was jig-saw puzzled into the little spaces between the banister's uprights, but I've been able to remove the winter's runners from the hall and can now walk on cool smoothness down to the bathroom. Well, lately I haven't been able to walk at all with my puffy knees, but that's what the cortisone is for.
( Wednesdays come closer together lately )

Malaise continues. I think it's the weather.

Finished?
Carter, The Devil's Feasts
-- the yucky 1840s

E.S. Thomson, Beloved Poison
-- come-by-chance at the library, another of those mysterious floating books with no call number. Also the yuckier 1840s, because in this case we're emptying a church graveyard to make room for railways. But it leads me to wonder: all the characters are slogging through the churchyard which is full of mud, disintegrating bodies, mud that has surrounded disintegrating bodies, and doubtless animal shit as well. And then they come home and scrape their boots on the scraper but they're still up to the ankles in effluvium. Did people never change their disgusting shoes in the middle class? or did they just track mud all over the carpets?

Reading now?
Thief of Time, because I feel the need of a Pratchett.

Otherwise and lackadaisically, Irvine Welsh's Marabou Stork Nightmares, which wikipedia tells me has a shocking ending; Ronia the Robber's Daughter because it's there, and Salzburg's Real happiness : the power of meditation which to date tells me nothing I don't already know but is at least a bit friendlier to those whose knees and and back hurt them.

Next?
No idea. Maybe if/ when I stop feeling headachey I'll start something meaty.

Waddell reminds me so much of (what I have heard about) donnish conversation in Oxbridge colleges- in-jokes, allusions, 'who needs no introduction' etc.

The port goes round so much the faster,
Topics are raised with no less ease –
Which advowson looks the fairest,
What the wood from Snape will fetch,
Names for pudendum mulieris,
Why is Judas like Jack Ketch?

Waddell at least is talking about more genial subjects than Larkin's smutty dons- well, I mean, Larkin, what would you expect?

"...But the new things are the anonymous lyrics, the glorious rhythms of

"O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina' and
"O admirabile Veneris idolum",
and still more significant in promise, the alba of the Vatican MS. formerly at Fleury, and "Iam dulcis amica" of the MS. of St. Martial of Limoges. The alba is more precious for its Provencal burden than for other merit: it still holds to Prudentius, and the cry might be to waken faithful souls rather than sleeping lovers, the enemy in ambush the Enemy of souls rather than the jealous guardian. But in its own exquisite phrase,

"Dawn is near: she leans across the dark sea".
For Iam dulcis amica, the quatrain halts a little, the rhythm wavers; Ovid's upholstery is in the background, a little the worse for wear. But its strength is in the sudden impatience with which the catalogue of attractions is thrust aside, the sudden liquid break like the first bird notes in the stuffy pedant-music of the Meistersingers:
Ego fui sola in silva
Et delexi secreta loca."
Maybe what she reminds me most of is Seidensticker's Tokyo diary, kept while he was translating Genji. It's the perfect companion to reading Genji itself, as Seidensticker chatters along about what he thinks of To no Chujo or Ukifune in between snarling at Mifune's obscurity and trying to find surviving bits of the Yoshiwara. The difference being that Genji is one book only, even if a long one; Waddell is referring to the whole corpus of medieval Latin lyric poetry, which one is supposed to have at one's fingertips. Naraba ii naa....

Am reading Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars as much for its personal as well as historical evocation of a time when all the world was young. Is as charmingly confusing to me now as it was forty-five years ago. Waddell not only throws in untranslated Latin sentences at whim (and Italian and Provençal and who knows what all- because any fule with a classical education knows all that already and if not, they can teach themselves), she assumes you know the historical background as well. Thank god for broadband and Wikipedia.

So off she goes about Paulinus of Nola (who? google him; contemporary of Magnus Maximus, known to me from Kipling; and jeez, who calls himself Great the Greatest?) and Ausonius, his older friend and mentor, and here she mentions Sulpicius Severus- "barrister and biographer before Anatole France of the Desert Fathers, the father of French prose although he wrote in Latin' see footnote 3, which gives us hurrah! a biographical summary *and* a translation of the pertinent bit:

Sulpicius Severus, c. 363-425; born at Toulouse; lost his young wife and renounced the world, but not its humours. Vide Dialogus I, on the five men in the desert, and one of them a Gaul, confronted by half a loaf. "Facis inhumane qui nos Gallos homines cogis examplo angelorum vivere:" (which I think means 'It's barbarous to think we men of Gaul can live like the angels') "-and anyhow I am convinced that for the sheer pleasure of eating the angels eat themselves."

So *that's* where I got that quotation. I always wondered.

("Ausonius and Sulpicius Severus... are the first representatives in literature of the French haute bourgeoisie, perhaps the most intellectual in Europe." You think? Well... maybe.)

paleaswater used to get fantoddy about the folk practices in 100 Demons, like bringing rocks down from the mountains or walking a certain route in the countryside without looking behind you. She said something to the effect of 'these people just didn't think like us.' A daughter of the Revolution might well look askance at something so foreign to her milieu. Cradle Catholic me, who unblinkingly accepted saint's hearts put on display in glass reliquaries and thin wheat wafers that are really and truly, no *really*, the body of a man murdered two millennia ago on the other side of the world, had no difficulty at all with these benign Japanese practices that only fleetingly, if at all, recall bloody dark deeds and obscure beliefs.

(The Japanese used to have human sacrifice. They'd wall someone up in the foundations of a bridge, for instance. And the one story I read about this custom- one of Yumemakura's Seimei stories- had the spirits of the sacrifices making a ruckus to alert the world that the foundation of their bridge was about to collapse. Like, you may not want to be a human sacrifice and you may insist that the wife who informed the authorities that you had the marks needed to be the sacrifice also die with you, but in the end *of course* duty trumps everything. Whatever happened to that Japanese staple, urami? In Ima Ichiko, it's saved for people who starved during famines.)

But the oddity is that the Chinese stories in The Classic fantod me in spades. They recall a dark and primordial world where, yes, people don't think like we do.
( Maybe it's the translation? )

With my new found riches I decided damn the expense, I shall INDULGE!! And turned on the central AC and left it running *all night.* Saturday was a scorcher, but the house stayed cool all day nonetheless. This is what happens when you have dry heat. Then I indulged again last night even though I could have gone with just fans. And within two hours of turning the thing off today's mug had crept in through crannies and cracks to make all hideous. Thus Toronto, ever.

I also indulged in clothes. Needing new tank tops and wandering into a sale at the Mall, I bought two rather-more-upscale-than-I'm-used-to items. And one is shaped to the male body and hence too tight, and the other had writing on it about No Coffee no Work, which was amusing in that tired way: but getting it home I see I missed a few letters and it says No Coffee no Workee. Yes, well: can I even give it to Goodwill? Even if you're hot and sweaty, try things on first. (I did try the 2XL tank tops at Mark's Wearhouse and put them back on the rack: they're shaped too and cling to my sizable corporation.)

Cellini- oh, Cellini. Why does anyone read him? 'I made these bowls that were the finest anyone had ever seen and then killed this man and fled to Siena where I made these medallions that were the most inventive anyone had ever seen and then killed this man and fled to Rome where I killed another man and *then* made these dies for the papal mint that were the most delicate anyone had ever seen'. "And he can go on like this for pages. Can, hell- does."

Everything is going wrong but the Happy Pills seem to be working because I find myself quite cheerful. One reason is C back at work, even in the painful fallout of her father's sudden death. Place doesn't function without her, is why it's dangerous to have an irreplaceable person in any organization. Or a position no one else wants to take, so that whoever has the position becomes irreplaceable. Other reason is going down to the laundry room and finding all the sheets and blankets neatly folded and put away in their baskets, which means Melanie has been at work. Even I, the Laundry Queen, can't be arsed to fold sheets, and *especially* not the infants' fitted ones. 'She's a keeper,' the cook agrees, and if only we could; but her career path is the biosciences, and she only works with us for fun.
( What, Wednesday already? )