radfrac_archive_full (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2014-09-08 12:07 am
radfrac_archive_full) wrote2014-09-08 12:07 am
Entry tags:
- books,
- bullshit pseudo-philosophy,
- classics book group,
- conference paper,
- emily dickinson,
- graphic novels,
- in a budding grove,
- in search of lost time,
- lost things,
- modpo,
- my emily dickinson,
- offshore!,
- penelope fitzgerald,
- poetry group,
- potty british novels,
- reading in parks,
- reviewing,
- rifflandia,
- supermoon,
- swanns's way,
- swimming,
- the guermantes way,
- the next thing,
- walt whitman,
- zorba the greek
Scattered observations under a supermoon
I want to keep up more regular posting here, but I've also finally started organizing/writing/creating the Other Blog, and that has left me drained. So here is -- some stuff.
Random Logistical Stuff
I still have not decided what the Next Thing is.
Everything is fine, except that everything about my life is about to be in need of repair and I don't have the funds, even the fake funds, to repair it.
From the ground up, off the top of my head:
Meanwhile, I am a member of two reading groups now: a poetry group and a classics reading group. The people in the classics reading group average, I would say, 25 years older than I am; in the poetry group, say 8 to 10 years younger? (But there are only two other people who have actually shown up to that group so far.)
The classics group was fun last time -- we read The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time 3 if you prefer) -- I did not quite finish it in time, but have finished it since. It was kind of a grind compared to Swann's Way or Part 1 of Within a Budding Grove, but still, you know, you read some Proust and you figure you probably spent your time right.
Unfortunately, the next book we're reading is Zorba the Greek, and I hate it. I really loathe it. It's always difficult to evaluate books read in translation, but here I believe are my most important issues:
Also am in magical working group and may join editorial collective of the online magazine I review for. Also am taking the film course and theoretically at least writing a conference paper for November. Oh,and taking the massive open online course through the Kelly Writers' House, ModPo (Modern American Poetry.)
Is that enough things? Probably, right? Oh, I have some reviews coming due now that the summer hiatus is over.
Also figuring out that Next Thing. Which is the only important thing in all of this, and the only thing I'm not doing, which I guess means I am doing it, passively. This thought, though, is depressing, so let's return to the immediate conditions of my life, which, as I have said are -- good.
For example: I spent most of yesterday reading in parks, which was as brilliant as it sounds. Two graphic novels and a Penelope Fitzgerald novella -- Offshore! (exclamation point hers, or anyway her publisher's). The comics because I feel like when I started university I connected really strongly to several series, but then dropped away except for the occasional look-in for upwards of a decade, and I've wanted to find my way back to a connection to this, you know, burgeoning genre. The Fitzgerald because there's just something about potty British novels, and while this was a minor example, it was just the sort of thing I like.
Nice to read just for the pleasure of consumption and not because of instructions from elsewhere.
Today after the poetry group I went to the beach and had a very brief, very cold swim in the ocean. I wanted to have swum again before the end of the summer (which this only technically is.) Then a long walk not exactly home -- all along Beach Drive, through the golf course, where offshore (or: Offshore!) a red and white sailboat was struggling against fresh whitecaps under an enormous moon.
There was a complicated business involving urination and bushes and deceptively steep slopes and somewhere in there I lost my bamboo mat. but generally -- a good sort of day. That tends to mean walks and books and feats of extremely minor derring-do.
{rf}
Random Logistical Stuff
I still have not decided what the Next Thing is.
Everything is fine, except that everything about my life is about to be in need of repair and I don't have the funds, even the fake funds, to repair it.
From the ground up, off the top of my head:
- Feet, immediate need: new shoes (both for support and for presentability)
- Feet, long-term goal: dropfoot brace
- Feet, impossible dream: new orthotics
- Shins: Shins are ok.
- Knees: A mess, but not in immediate need of appliances
- Pelvis: Could do with round of nice new underwear esp given new social opportunity to display it -- well, that is another post
- Gut: New bottle of enzymes would sure be nice
- Heart (et al): am almost out of gym tickets. Positive: can get student price.
- Eyes, immediate need: eye test, new glasses (so that I can go to job interviews and meet peoples' eyes)
- Ears: test and cleaning
- Teeth, immediate need: crown/crown-substitute filling
- Endocrine system: Will run out of T before medical plan kicks in, but am in denial about this
- Mood: Have run out of all supplements and vitamins, so any of those would be ducky as Winter is Coming
- Mood, impossible dream: new DayLight(tm) as old one has burnt out; or, new DayLight(tm) bulbs and capacity to open existing DayLight(tm) (currently cannot figure this out at all as screwheads are all down tiny infinitely deep wormholes in surface)
- Technology: New cell phone or other device (am without any. Have begun carrying around land line cordless phone in pocket just so I can at least know what time it is. Which reminds me to take it out of bag & put it back in base.)
- Technology: New computer as borrowed one must be returned to my mother in January (Yes. My ability to do my job depends on my mom. Thanks, mom.)
Meanwhile, I am a member of two reading groups now: a poetry group and a classics reading group. The people in the classics reading group average, I would say, 25 years older than I am; in the poetry group, say 8 to 10 years younger? (But there are only two other people who have actually shown up to that group so far.)
The classics group was fun last time -- we read The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time 3 if you prefer) -- I did not quite finish it in time, but have finished it since. It was kind of a grind compared to Swann's Way or Part 1 of Within a Budding Grove, but still, you know, you read some Proust and you figure you probably spent your time right.
Unfortunately, the next book we're reading is Zorba the Greek, and I hate it. I really loathe it. It's always difficult to evaluate books read in translation, but here I believe are my most important issues:
- It is very badly written.
- It is full of bullshit pseudo-philosophy.
- It is full of misogyny masquerading as bullshit pseudo-philosophy
Also am in magical working group and may join editorial collective of the online magazine I review for. Also am taking the film course and theoretically at least writing a conference paper for November. Oh,and taking the massive open online course through the Kelly Writers' House, ModPo (Modern American Poetry.)
Is that enough things? Probably, right? Oh, I have some reviews coming due now that the summer hiatus is over.
Also figuring out that Next Thing. Which is the only important thing in all of this, and the only thing I'm not doing, which I guess means I am doing it, passively. This thought, though, is depressing, so let's return to the immediate conditions of my life, which, as I have said are -- good.
For example: I spent most of yesterday reading in parks, which was as brilliant as it sounds. Two graphic novels and a Penelope Fitzgerald novella -- Offshore! (exclamation point hers, or anyway her publisher's). The comics because I feel like when I started university I connected really strongly to several series, but then dropped away except for the occasional look-in for upwards of a decade, and I've wanted to find my way back to a connection to this, you know, burgeoning genre. The Fitzgerald because there's just something about potty British novels, and while this was a minor example, it was just the sort of thing I like.
Nice to read just for the pleasure of consumption and not because of instructions from elsewhere.
Today after the poetry group I went to the beach and had a very brief, very cold swim in the ocean. I wanted to have swum again before the end of the summer (which this only technically is.) Then a long walk not exactly home -- all along Beach Drive, through the golf course, where offshore (or: Offshore!) a red and white sailboat was struggling against fresh whitecaps under an enormous moon.
There was a complicated business involving urination and bushes and deceptively steep slopes and somewhere in there I lost my bamboo mat. but generally -- a good sort of day. That tends to mean walks and books and feats of extremely minor derring-do.
{rf}