Off the Cliff

The mundaneity of my dreams yields briefly to something more resonant, where I need to apologize to the boyfriend I treated so badly in my teenaged years, who turns out to be Ramses II and still miffed after all these decades. Yes, I did have a thing for Ramses when I was thirteen and no, I had no boyfriends or even sig.oths when I was a teenager, so go figure. But the up thing about the meds is that they screw my time sense as badly as morphine did post-op, but much more happily. As in, I sleep and wake and sleep again and wake again and think 'oh rats, I've been sleeping for hours, it must be nearly noon.' (I have a very precise internal clock that I usually won't even consult because it will tell me the time too closely.) And then I discover that my luxurious sleep-in has taken me to merely 9:15, my preferred wake up time. But I'm as sleep-sodden as if it were in fact noon.

Have finished nothing last week but got maybe 200 pages into Marlon James' Black Leopard, Red Wolf which is slow because it eschews familiar narrative style for something more opaque. I'll buy it at Bakka and proceed at my own pace: it requires more than the three weeks the library permits me, with thirty other people waiting to read it. Also it's work, having to translate the narration into terms that make sense to me (not unlike that other James, Henry) and in these parlous times all I can stand is the lightest of entertainment.

But I did what is usually fatal and read a few reviews, which wasn't fatal this time because I seem to have read a different book from the reviewers. They referenced GRRM and Star Wars and Neverwhere and several other totally western narratives, and nobody once mentioned Amos Tutuola, let alone Daniel O. Fagunwa. But if Marlon James isn't working in the fantastic African tradition, what is it? because there was nothing of Martin or Lucas or Gaiman in what I read. Maybe thenarration changes halfway through?

Well, will be falling. Is why I biked around all day stocking up, so I can stay in all tomorrow drinking wine and eating ham sandwiches, reading Black Leopard, Red Wolf and not getting out of bed more than I have to, except to salt the sidewalks with the salt I bought today.

Have finished the first Black Company trilogy, only to have vols 2&3 fall apart as I did so. Now I wonder about the rest of the second rank books ie the paperbacks behind the first row of paperbacks in the bedroom. Do I want to/ will I ever reread the whole of the Witch World saga? Michael Moorcock? Fritz Leiber? Suck fairy aside, will they even physically hold up to a reread? I wish I read faster than I do; I wish I had a fireplace where I could skim through these fallen-leaf-brittle books and then toss the pages into the grate.
( It's not like I actually want to move anywhere )

Which I don't like doing. I want to approach a book in total ignorance of both plot and genre, absolutely sans preconceptions. However, when the book is straight gothic, and *not* gothic romance, maybe I need the same warnings as for horror, which I won't read at all. Certainly The Thirteenth Tale is as fantoddy as Faulkner, largely because it's the Brontes done straight. And, by me, much more Wuthering Heights than Jane Eyre, complete with loutish idiots and imbecile housekeepers and inbred families and a version of Cathy that shows just how demented Cathy is. Brilliant book, very unfun read. Has been succeeded by The Binding, the first ten pages of which suggest that I take my own advice up there in the subject line before embarking on another nightmare.

Today was January cold and December dank. My massage was at the end of the day and so she was much less thorough than if it had been earlier, thus I still hurt. Here in the side bedroom the windows have double glass (though not double panes) and then special fitted plastic sheets over them, originally designed to shut out noise at houses near airports: and I still feel a draft coming from somewhere. It's supposed to be above freezing next week, but not much above, when what I need to break this winter wanhope is the usual average 10C and a little sun and a return to shoes. I'm back to playing Musical Boots: drop a kilo of water weight and my boots are too big and chafe me so I must use the smaller ones; put it back on and my boots are too small and pinch my toes and I must put my orthotics back in the larger boots.

Four more months of this, I tell myself, and six weeks of whatever kind of spring we get, and then I'll have the operation and possibly not be crippled any longer. Well, not be knee crippled: the elbows and shoulders and possibly the hip as well are another matter entirely.

So Thursday evening I was terribly chuffed at how limber I was after my long day in my bikeless state. Friday of course I was crippled even after an acupuncture session and a mere two hours at work. Knees, lower back, elbows, all screaming after I walked the two blocks from home to the store. Gloom doom despair oh what to do?

Today in spite of ongoing aches I had errands to run before tomorrow's rain and Monday's snow, so I pulled the new bike out of the bunker and gingerly climbed aboard. Reasoning that half the problem with it being too small for comfort is my thick-soled boat-shoes, I put on my tinyboots from ten years ago. I can't walk in the things because they're so narrow, and actually getting them on is a struggle for the same reason, but yes: low shoes mean I needn't bend my unbending knees as much, and I did manage to run hither thither and yon without incident. Will say that New Bike's leather-covered handlebars are comforting to the palms, and their lowness is probably easier on the elbows. Still don't feel completely in control of the thing and would never bike after dark on it.

So I accomplished all my To Do list except depositing my paycheque because I'd put it in my copy of The Secret Chapter that I was reading after its arrival yesterday (and thank you very much, G) but removed from the backpack to make space for the library book I had to return. However! At twenty to six I get a text from the bike guy that my bicycle is ready, and not on Monday as he'd said. So I hoofed it over in record time, limberness having suddenly returned, and now I'm horsed again on a smoothly running velo with a new chain. Go me.

Still intend to stay in bed most of tomorrow reading, because of course three library holds all came in at the same time.

Why would I keep vols 2&3 of the Black Company, but not vol. 1? I suppose, she sighs, looking at the two-deep paperback ranks on the eight foot high bedroom bookshelves, it's here somewhere, but maybe I'll wait til the library coughs it up to pursue my bout of 80s nostalgia. (Book of the New Sun, 1982 on Wellesley; The Black Company, 1985 on Brunswick; both very time&place-specific.)

Dunno whose rec led me to put a hold on Simone St.James' The Other Side of Midnight, but I did and I read it this weekend and now I realize I have actually read a romance novel for the first time in my life, unless you count that m/m supernatural thing a while ago. Like that one, the plot was fine but asexual me thought the romance part unnecessary. Life was more fun when I had hormones.

How lucky that my massage therapist does acupuncture as well. My left elbow is ever so much happier than yesterday. Must get her to do the right one next week. What beats me, though, is how muscles that I stretch and exercise twice daily ie quads, scream like babies when she pokes them. What does it take to make them unclench, when I'm not aware of them clenching in the first place?

Also my knee still clicks, click-clock, which is distracting. But at least it doesn't hurt, or at least not today.

As for reading Wednesday, I finished nothing in the last week except a book of crosswords. (cough) Currently near the end of The Library of the Unwritten and halfway through Love in the Time of Cholera. The former is Good Omens-ish because it involves demons and angels and a couple of neither-nors. The latter is going to give me a hangover because Latin American lit does that, but is well enough so far.

A hold I'd completely forgotten about came in at the library. Appropriately, it's The Bodies in the Library. And while a nice mystery is what I need right now, I'm not sure this is it.

Otherwise we're at the calico patchwork quilt stage of autumn, all the colours all the time. Brief as cherry blossoms and much more beautiful.

So, I finished Winter's Tale. Left me feeling a little blerg, which is how I felt all the time I was reading it. Loved all the winter bits, loved the not!New York, especially the idealized 1890s, only it couldn't have been the 1890s even in its own universe but never mind. Still have an unsettled gut from reading it.

Then find this on my tumblr dash:

-I love that Tolkien took a paragraph aside in Bree, after all the horses were run off, just to let us know that A) Merry’s ponies were going to be fine and B) Mr. Butterbur would not, in the long run, suffer financially by the incident. He understood what was really important.

-One of the recurring themes in Tolkien’s works is that the world belongs to the baker down the street as much as it does to the Lord of the Golden Hall. In almost every city we visit, Tolkien talks about shops and living arrangements and where people work and how they get their food.

Helprin doesn't really care about the commoners and likes to slaughter them en masse without pity or comment. As with Pullman, the essential man will come through the verbiage, and the essential man is not likable.

Yesterday was muggy and hot, and I barely managed the three things on my list because of aches. Today began the same, but the wind blew dry air in- hot dry air, but dry- and the laundry I couldn't think of doing yesterday got done and put on the line and dried in three hours, and joints were almost quiet.

Still, it gets dark too early these days. Autumn, sigh.

Finished Purple Hibiscus but did what I never do and read the last chapter when I was halfway through, just to be prepared for the worst. Worst didn't happen, and justice was served in its fashion, but lord that was an enraging read. Mainlined a Ruth Rendell to clear my palate but it turned into Rendell being appallingly naive about several things, including female reactions to assault. So that didn't help. And now I'm back to Halprin, whose magic realism somehow gives me the oogies as well, much as Mieville did in Perdido. Can't escape the fact that this is Dude Lit, however unmainstream it may be.

Really, back to manga is the only solution.

September does this occasionally, the sudden hot spell just as the leaves are turning and the first cold nights start you thinking about furnaces or at least space heaters. After last night's prolonged thunderstorm and monsoon rains blew in a warm front, today was 28C and blistering in the sun, though breezy and pleasant enough in the shade. But as ever, high heat and humidity make me feel like a water-logged bag o' flesh, and everything hurts all the time. It's supposed to thunder again tonight and return us to a high of 19C tomorrow, but I doubt if that's enough to debloat me, if the chilly weekend didn't manage it.

However the daycare top-up, which our (speaking of bloated) smug thug of a premier was supposed to cancel, came in today, and I have 600-some extra dollars I wasn't expecting, so yay for that.

Reading-wise, I managed to finish Roger Lancelyn-Green's Myths of the Norsemen in a battered copy from the Front Lawn Library, read to remind me what the canon of it actually is before I go on, if I ever go on, to the Eddas themselves. What happened to my childhood copy of Norse Myths and Legends with the black and white Beardsley-inspired illustrations? Oh, it's Padraic Collum's The Children of Odin, and here's the bit I remember where Loki eats the witch's heart. Mh. Maybe I won't read the Eddas after all. I don't care for trickster gods, and the rest of the Aesir are prime examples of Men (or gods) Behaving Badly.

Currently working on Kari Sperring's The Grass King's Concubine, which is fun but doesn't need to be as slow as it is. I'm even skimmimg bits, which I rarely do. My downstairs reading, for as long as it lasts, is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus, because I'm not sure how much I can take of abusive Nigerian Catholic paterfamiliases.

And there's still lots of Rainy Willow, though vol15 isn't quite up to the heights of 14.

Have been earwormed all week by Steeleye Span's King Henry. Earworms usually have one line at least that relates to my current situation. This doesn't. But I was chuffed to learn that there actually is a Scots ballad that forms the basis for SS' version, but that the ballad has no music attached, so the composer borrowed one. Not that it sounds like Bonaparte's Retreat to me at all.

I managed to finish Ruth Rendell's The Speaker of Mandarin and that's it. Ordinarily I'd just go read more Rendell, but that's summer lassitude talking. None of my genre books inspires me with the desire to read; I reaĺly need cooler weather for those doorstoppers. So I had the bright idea of trying something Completely Different. I have a number of my mother's books, ganked from the home library thirty years ago: mostly stuff I thought I might want to read sometime in my old age etc. Well, old age is on me, so let's try something mainstream. In this case, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel. And it starts very nicely with a bunch of tween war expats summering in, I assume, the south of France. It could be the lead-in to an Agatha Christie mystery. But then it goes on and on, and no one is murdered, and I can't keep the various Mrses and Misses straight, and it becomes as much a chore as the genre works.

So I fall back on a Front Lawn Library Ian Rankin, which is probably not going to cheer me up, given past Rankins, but oh well. Yes, I know I should just forge on with Hamabe no Kafka, because when everything reads the same, Murakami's utterly mundane Japanese at least has the virtue of language practice. But I only have patience for a few pages at a time of that.

Roll on September...

My doctor is still MIA, along with her business partner and secretary. Am reliant for my meds on a new ON policy that allows druggists to extend a scrip for one month at discretion. Presumably my doctor's 'afterhours health network' that I am advised to consult, rather than a walk-in clinic, has access to her records and can do the same, but it's a different doctor in a different location every day, which is hardly convenient for the mobility-impaired non-driver. It would be nice to have a heads up notice when someone goes on holiday for more than a week, or at least a change of voice mail message. No, madam, your office is clearly *not* open from 9 to 5 Monday to Thursday. My dentist manages up-to-date messages. Why don't you?

Did finally mail the authorization to have the linden chopped, six pages of bumpf required by the city to trim a city tree. Would have been done a week ago by email if this tablet would let me edit PDFs, which unaccountably it doesn't.

Morning knee crumble and butt spasm continue. Aging still sucks.

Am on tablet, so don't feel like html-ing a reading entry. Have finished Mistress Pat and the homoerotic Magpie Lord, a not bad KJ Charles. Am reading The True Queen, which I like better than Sorceror to the Crown. (But oh! pro publishing for the West has flattened Afrai's style so much.) Will continue Gideon the Ninth and hope it becomes less Hunger Games in time. Not that I've read the Hunger Games, but I get the frisson all the time.

Dear lord but almond milk is *vile*. When I was very young I had a doll made out of rubber. Almond milk tastes the way that doll smelled.

Weather continues very warm but not oppressively so. Oppressive is 35C and we hover at 30 with breezes. 'In July the sun is hot. Is it shining? No it's not.' Which is half-true. Days have gone to thin cirrus coverings that pale the shadows, which is fine by me.

Books finished?
Wolfe, The Shadow of the Executioner

Reading Now?
Wolfe, The Claw of the Conciliator
-- The Book of the New Sun is so recursive that I've had to put everything else on hold till it's done, and also keep vol 1 handy for reference as I wade through vol 2. And occasionally have recourse to the web to remind me who this person is I met ninety pages back, while trying to avoid spoilers.

Reading next?
Whatever the next one is. (googles) The Sword of the Lictor (Oh geez, you mean there's a fifth volume as well? Oh crap. Must I?)

Gideon the Ninth

And if all these depress me too much, and they do, The October Man arrived yesterday. I thought it wasn't released here until the fall, and maybe not, because Bakka isn't carrying it and somehow the American edition is going for $40. So I ordered it from England for a pittance.

Abandoned?
Probably K.J. Charles, The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal
-- people keep mentioning Charles as a fun writer. I suppose if I still had hormones I might not find her mandatory sex scenes so annoyingly intrusive, but I don't and I do. Let them delight some other e-readerer.

Not that it's happened yet. But every so often there are stretches where it does, and I feel reborn..

Josie's house across the way sold to a lesbian couple with several kids and at least two dogs. They redid the basement to make a granny suite for one grandmother. But now they're temporarily moved out while major renovations happen inside, including it seems a new staircase. This week has seen the porch stripped of its covering, which I rather thought was concrete. New stairs are being put in. The facing was taken off, something altered inside, and then somehow put back. And I wonder to myself where the money for this is coming from, because houses on the street have been going for over a million since 2015. I hope it wasn't inherited from Grandma, whom I liked.
( Reading Wednesday )

The trouble with reading things on the tablet, aside from the comprehension scrim that distances even quondam familiar writers like Agatha Christie, is that the battery runs down. So I've had a paperback to read while the battery recharges. It's a damned thick paperback, with small print, and for travelling purposes as heavy as the tablet, making it one with much recent reading like Freedom and Necessity and The Bone People. Unlike those it's a reread from the mid-80s: Shiga Naoya's A Dark Night's Passing.

(And no, I'm not rereading it just because it's one of the books in Murakami's Kafka's library, because it might be Shiga's short stories there, and probably is.)

I remember almost nothing of the book, just that the protagonist spends an awful lot of time hanging out in teahouses with geisha, not enjoying himself much but apparently unable to think of anything better to do. That can't be the whole of a 400 page novel, I thought, but it's certainly the whole of the first hundred pages. When he's not getting drunk in the teahouses, falling asleep there, having a bath, getting drunk again, and essentially paying for the hire of two geisha for 24 hours or more (poor women), he's wandering off to eat in restaurants with various friends. The question of how he pays for this is only once addressed, and then he sells some of his books to cover one evening's visit. How he manages the rest of the time is anyone's guess. But back he goes, again and again, because he has to see this woman or that one so as to judge if she's attractive or not. He isn't going to start an affair with her because he avows that 'I know nothing about such things.' (One hopes he knows it'll cost him a great deal more than just hiring her to play cards, which is what he does a lot of). No, he's trying to find out how he *feels* about women. The book is hardly an advertisement for the discreet charm of the Taishou intellectual, because neither protag nor his friends have any at all. One can enjoy a self-absorbed bon vivant and man about town who's actually enjoying himself, but one who just moons around in vague and perpetual dissatisfaction is a bore. I don't say he's a Japanese Holden Caulfield- for one thing, he's much hornier- but he's just as much a dweeb.

Nonetheless I'm enjoying the book because of all the place names. Shiga's Sugamo is certainly not mine, though his Ginza might have been, and my tramping grounds in Shinjuku and Ikebukuro were, I think, pretty close to farmland in the 1920s; but the older shitamachi sections near the river seem pretty much the same. Yes, Taishou houses were all wood and not the stucco and plaster I saw almost thirty years ago, but the feel of these neighbourhoods- Ueno, Akasaka, Hongo- sounds the same.

And since the tablet recharged, I was able to finish The Affair of the Mysterious Letter this afternoon. How I wish for a paper copy so I could leaf back and trace those vaguely noted King in Yellow references, and possibly compare them with the original, supposing I still have my copy of that. Or maybe I should just leave it all as the fantastic mishmash it reads as, pointless of disentanglement, given that the action is of the 'runaway cart rattling downhill' school: you can't follow where it's going or where it's been, you can only hold on as it swerves hither and thither and gains speed, and trust to avoid a crash at the end.

But I do suspect it of having inspired one of my dreams last night, a baroque Buddhistic cartoon in the style of Avatar the Last Airbender, with much emphasis on the intricate designs on the characters' robes.

And when it does come, one is incredulous and amazed. But there it is, and I've checked it twice. My property tax installments have dropped by $40 a month. Now, the city giveth and the city taketh away, blessed be the name of the city, and next year they may bump it back up again. But for now I'll take that extra $240 and be grateful.

Reading Wednesday still chugs along slowly. Hamabe no Kafka goes nowhere fast, but now I've been reminded what's up with that librarian I take extra note of the very mundane details Murakami gives of his shirts and whatall. The proof of Murakami's mundaneity is that I don't have to look up any of his kanji, even though I began a desultory review of the basic 2000 and was distressed at how many I've forgotten in the last few years of non-reading.

Am also forging ahead with The Affair of the Mysterious Letter, reading on the tablet, and trying not to get too dizzy with it. The story would make my head spin even in paper-print. Add my cognitive handicap when reading onscreen, and we have utmost confusion, as well as a sneaking suspicion that a more intimate acquaintance with both Robert Chambers and the Lovecraftian corpus might render the book, if not more comprehensible, then at least more appreciable. I mean, it's great fun even if you don't get all the in-jokes, but I'm feeling the lack of a frame of reference here.

The current crisis leads me to having two early morning shifts in the next two days. I console myself for same with ativan which gives me, as well as sweet sleep, a lift in the spirits while waiting for sweet sleep to come, so that I forget that I must be up half an hour earlier than usual in order to do the exercises that allow me to stand up when I get out of bed. Tuesday morning, because of a dream I'd had that I was as limber as pre-65, I tried standing up without either stretches or knee brace, and it was a hallway's worth of Nope. What cheeses me is that this level of cripple only began in January, in spite of weight loss and a month's worth of good physiotherapy. Yes, prior to that knees were stiff and I was limpy on first getting out of bed, but it wasn't a case of 'can't put any weight on it at all.' Bah humbug, say I.

(OTOH, ativan sleep makes me much less crippled than after ordinary sleep. So much of it must be the muscles anc not just the joint itself.)

Leonard Bernstein told them what they saw."

Having finally finished the Connolly, I go to Goodreads, as ever, to find out what it's about. A lot of men really really like it, as does Donna Tartt. Many people complain about the chunks of untranslated French, which I'd put down to a bit of personal snobbishness. He translates all the Latin passages from Vergil and Horace, which any public school boy would already know; but evidently thinks that the real intelligentsia don't need to have Pascal rendered comprehensible for them.

Many people call it a war diary. The war may background the emotions but as far as I can recall he never refers to it directly, nor hints that all his magical beloved places in France are now lost to him, and may never be seen again; or that many of the London locales he mentions are currently flattened by the Blitz. Possibly he assumes that anyone reading this in 1945 will be aware of these facts, but theoretically he's writing a masterpiece for the ages- who'd have to consult the endpapers to find out it dates to wartime.

Mostly however I'm with the woman who says 'a third of the way into the book I kept thinking I would like to find Connolly's wife, buy her a stiff drink, then sit back and let the tape recorder roll.'

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.

It isn't hot but it's not cold, meaning that I'm now in a different reality from the last six months, or rather, last week. Warmth has hit the reset button on my personality and consequently erased most memories from my Cold-self period. Can't remember what the last book I finished was, and when I do remember, I forget it again immediately. (It was The Death of the Necromancer.) Granted, I've also been immersed in Freedom and Necessity, compulsively readable and almost 600 pages- but then, I generally find epistolary novels go faster than the other kind. Voice, you know. Something that long creates its own reality, but in heat, most things do. As an example, last night I reread the first few chapters of my recovered Madness of Angels, only to have oogies for the rest of the evening because these really are oogie books, first read in the unseasonably hot May of 2012 and thus nightmare fuel ever after. Brust and Bull provided a good enough antidote, or otherwise I'd have needed more 100Demons or Aaronovitch or Pratchett to exorcise the voice of Matthew Swift. (Or Dick Francis. It says something that three out of four of my touchstones of reality should be white English men.)

In the gratitudes department, took my bike over to the paranoid bike guy, the one who believes the government tracks you through the PA system in national parks. The shop said Open but the door was locked, just like last time. Last time I only had a slow leak that let me peddle to a Bloor St store, but this was a puncture that went flop ten minutes after being pumped. But as I was standing and dou shiyouing he rode up on his bike with a coffee and a newspaper and fixed it then and there. His bete noir, I understand, is people who actually leave their bikes with him because his hole in the wall shop has no storage space at all. Thus he was pleased that I would hang around while he fixed it, pay him cash, and ride away afterward. And I was pleased to have my bike back, but paranoid because between last winter's snow and this spring's construction, my biking routes are littered with gravel, stones, glass, nails, and a lot of sharp-sided and unavoidable crap, all liable to attack at any time and render me a limping walker again.

Back to November. Cherry blossoms look amazing against an iron grey sky. Mine all fell in last night's heavy rain, thicker than snowflakes, but two doors south's tree is still intact, even with leaves breaking through.

I remember very little of this weekend, probably because I did very little, aside from some ill-advised desultory reading of Game of Thrones online and Faulkner in paper. (Really, Johnson, give that book away. Southern gothic is not good for you.) At least I walked a bit today, and hung washes on the line, which dried faster in yesterday's warm-not-hot than they did in today's cool and windy. Also had first open windows of the year, in the study, but not the bedrooms because they still hold the cold from Thursday and Friday's single digit lows.

Oh, and I vacuumed. The new beast is better than the dirt devil if not quite as good as the Hoover. But it uses bags and I keep forgetting how to open it up to check bag fullness. Not that the bag will be full at this point: but the DD is a canister type and cleaning with it gives me the positive reinforcement of seeing just how much dust I've sucked up. I miss that.

Some advice to the depressed I came across on tumblr-I-think said 'you don't have to do everything. Just floss your teeth.' As I sink into my spring SAD, I've decided that whatever else I do or don't, I will at least floss my teeth. Supposing I can stay awake long enough because lord! but narcolepsy has me in its clutches these days.

Weather doesn't help. Monday I went out without gloves and regretted it bitterly (see what I did there?) Yesterday wore my winter coat and last night still had the heat on, as winds made bicycling a pain. Today was tshirt weather until the sun went in and a thunderstorm blew through. And now I want the heat on again though tomorrow will be back in the low 60sF.

Finished?
Tanith Lee, Companions on the Road
--plucked off the shelves, fairly certain I never read it, finished in an afternoon on Sunday. Everything is vaguely kimoi these days, and Lee is no exception, even though this has a happyish ending. Maybe it was the overlapping kimoi of As I Lay Dying, begun right afterwards, that coloured my experience.

Reading now?
Perennially, and getting nowhere:

Seraphina, which I must decide am I reading it or not because it's due back at the library on Saturday. Does it spark joy? No, but it's good enough. Which is good enough until it ceases to be, and then I want something else.

Edmund White, Inside a Pearl
-- subtitled 'my years in Paris.' I had no high hopes of this: expected it to be 'newly famous American author goes to Paris and is feted by the French literati: expect many famous names.' Well, not quite. White goes to Paris as a Vogue writer, having assured them he speaks French fluently, which he doesn't, at all. This would give me anxiety attacks; but White is one of those guys who thinks faking it is a lark. Except that he does then have anxiety attacks over his interviews, which, well, you knew that when you signed on, guy. Still, compared with the bumptiousness of men who go to Japan and fake things, White has a certain charm. For one thing, he works really hard at improving his French, by spending hours lying on a sofa and reading everything he can get.

His American fame doesn't open doors for him, or not for long. He notes that the literati will fete him *once*, and then move on to the next new thing once they've seen this new face that everyone must see. This doesn't bother him because he's busy with his sexual pursuits and affairs with foreigners. It's the foreign lovers who get him into film festivals and the art world, which run differently from the intellectuals, and thank god.

There's still a veil of- alright, here's that word again- kimoi that hangs over the text. Whether it's me in my current funk, whether it's the 80s AIDS crisis background to White's life, whether it's that partial memory I have of reading Caracole in Tokyo where, trust me, its bizarreness read doubly bizarre, I can't say, but I feel I have a 100 Demons' type fuzzy black Thing lowering over my shoulder as I read the list of Famous People White runs into in Paris: none of whom seem at all happy, let alone cheerful.

G.K. Chesterton, Thomas Aquinas
-- bought years ago from a guy selling his library outside the quondam Rochdale, once a counter-culture drug haven, now assisted housing. I figured I could read Chesterton without pain. Not sure I can now. To quote poliphilo over on LJ:
"Chesterton was a polemicist- which is a fancy name for pub bore- and is always banging on about his blasted opinions. He once accused H.G. Wells of having sold his birth right as a story teller for a pot of message- and if there was ever a case of the pot calling the kettle black..." And this isn't fiction, so Chesterton can rant away for pages. Can, hell: does.

Reading next?
Some ebooks may be coming from the library in time for the long weekend. Maybe I should do a reread of 100Demons or even Rainy Willow, just because.

Still unseasonably cold, still winter jacket weather at 9C with no sun. A few diffident plum or cherry blossoms appear on streets that get whatever sun there is, but the horticultural landscape is behind the (new) seasonal. Temperatures might get into the teens this weekend, but if it rains, it still won't feel warm.

Yesterday I had an eye appointment and bicycled down in the rain and scarily gusty wind, which as ever came from whatever direction I was trying to go in and nearly knocked me sideways as I passed Robarts, not usually a wind tunnel area. Meanwhile hordes of high school students passed me on foot, bound possibly for the general strike/ demonstration at the Legislature a long block away. Our cocaine dealing Premier has been teacher-baiting. Gone alas are the days when the province's teachers could bring down a government. Now they're fair game.

Rehearsing for retirement, I stayed away from work on my two days off. This might have worked better if I hadn't ached abominably both days, with hip flexors and low back spasming into inexplicable rigidity, and if I hadn't been power-reading The Bone People. I was enchanted at first by a Booker Prize winner that was quirky and language-loving and utterly unlike the 'misunderstood white man by a lake' school of writing. (Though really that's an American trope, and the Booker IME just tends towards Misunderstood Men.) But read without the corrective presence of other human beings, it gave me the fantods, and now I have a bad taste in my mouth over it, which I'm trying to erase with the second last Hyakki Yakki. 25 had some interesting discoveries on reread, but 26 so far is both frustrating and obscure. So is Phantom Moon 5, but I might be better off with that new territory rather than the indifferent vol 26.

However, my s-i-l, genki as ever, heard me saying that I wanted to buy a power saw to cut up the ancient pine branches that have been sitting for at least a year on my porch, and cut down the rest of the scraggly pine bushes, and maybe lower the hedge as well; and so I came home today to a porch swept and bare of branches, which were sawed up and tied in bundles for the garbage. Two of the pines were gone, but she thought the corner one should stay. Best of all, the various trash that had accumulated on the table until I could think of a way of disposing of it (tiles, concrete pieces, wooden frames that didn't work for concrete repairs) was all bundled into garbage bags waiting for the next pickup. Oh happy day!

Of course I still want a power saw because even my genki s-i-l said she had to take two tylenols after all that sawing.

The last long weekend we had, back in February, I had appointments on all three days and regretted it because the weather was miserable. This weekend I only have two but both are on rainy days that make travel almost as unpleasant. But this time I can bicycle in raingear and needn't walk anywhere if I don't want to, so shall call myself happy.

I continue on with my Classic Short Stories but wonder what's wrong with me that my reactions are so different from other people's. I think the heroine of Flowering Judas behaves perfectly rationally, aside from being in the middle of a Mexican civil war in the first place. I'd be non-reactive with people like that if I found myself in their dangerous company. Certainly the safest course. And I practically cheered at the end of Rain. Go Sadie Thompson, girl guerilla!

And otherwise I read back archives of my LJ because one should have something sensational to read when stuck indoors.

In an attempt to avoid finishing the latest 100 Demons, I plucked an ancient unread book from the poetry shelf- Norse Poems by W.H. Auden and Paul B Taylor. Read the first one, The Lay of Volund, with a plethora of confusable names. Mh. Volund the crippled smith. Wieland, by any chance? Google a bit, get involved in the Volsungs, sheesh the whole of Scandinavian literature can be summarized as Men Behaving Badly and that includes the Finns. The Norse are at least equal opportunity, since the women behave just as badly as the men.

Then I check my shelves, pull out my Oxford copy of The Poetic Edda, and yes, that's exactly what Auden was translating. Not sure I want to read it anymore.

Meanwhile, Benadryl and codeine cough syrup together guarantee a long protracted sleep, especially if it's dark and raining. Not all that protracted really, since I woke several times to pee or just to float to the surface of consciousness. But back to sleep instantly, or roll onto my other side and sink back down, because delicious delicious sleep is a luxury. Consequently didn't wake up until noon by the clock. Actually I don't mind cold rainy days, but I wish it would stop thundering now. Enh, April. Possible snow tomorrow...

Two weeks ago or so my 97 year old aunt had what looked like a stroke, even though the wonders of modern medicine could find no proof of it. But inability to move one side of the body, speak, or swallow looks enough like a duck that we'll call it that. She regained a little movement in hospital but mostly spent her time sleeping. I was waiting for my cough to get better before going to visit her- *I* know it's allergies but hospitals aren't so forgiving- and had intended to do it Monday afternoon, which I theoretically had off except then I was feeling the daycare fever coming on me. So fine, maybe Wednesday. But Monday night my cousin emailed us all to say a room had miraculously opened up in a terminal care facility in the town where she lives, 40 miles away, and Aunt Margie was whisked away by ambulance Tuesday morning. So somehow I need to get to St Catharines, but does the GO system give me schedules? No, they want to tell me the next three buses leaving at the time I choose, but not what runs when through the day. They're giving my aunt 'weeks or months' so I need to do this soon.
( Wednesday )

So, my nemesis at work used all the salt we ordered specially, for stairs and such, on thawing out the toddler playground, with no thought either for the preschool ice rink or the garbage/ diaper disposal area. Consequently, yesterday I slipped on the ice in the latter and landed hard. Was resigned to being crippled today because, in a fit of fed-up-ness, I neglected to ice the knees after I got home. This morning however I woke with nary a pain in either knee nor hip. Must have shocked my body into good behaviour, at least temporarily.

(The arms are another matter. I now have a certain muscular slowness in the neck region, very reminiscent of the whiplash I got after being knocked off my bike in the mid-oughties. At least I can still sit up and lie down, which then I couldn't.)

But limberness was as well, because I'd been hearing noises in the bathroom the last day or two, and since I was over my fed-up-ness, I went down to the basement to investigate. And there of course was my once-mended water pipe happily spewing water over the back basement. However I live in the future, where I can google plumbers and pick a five-star one. Who came three hours later, fixed everything in half an hour, and only charged me $250 plus tax. Call this a win.
( Memeage again )