Turning Pages

I was hoping to get a fair bit of reading done in the last two months of the year, but I can't honestly say that November has been fruitful in this regard, so far at least. It doesn't help that I've got some marking to do for the IB November papers. However, the simple truth of the matter is that I seem incapable of reading anything at a reasonable pace at the moment.

I thought I'd storm through Middlemarch, but I managed just thirty pages today. Mind you, I got more out of Ladislaw's encounter with Dorothea and Casaubon in Rome than on any other previous reading, especially with regard to Eliot's views on the functions of art as hinted at in these pages. The sequence reminded me in some ways of the bit in Anna Karenina in which Vronsky goes in for painting. Eliot lacks the dazzling insights of Tolstoy a propos the theme, but she's intelligent in a sturdily thought-provoking manner.

I also moved on in the great-sonnet-read-through, getting up to number 78, which means I'm over the halfway mark and moving into the Rival Poet set. In this case I'm happy not to be rushing through the sequence, but I'm uneasily aware of a sense of losing sight of the overall architecture. Paterson, by the way, is extremely good on the numerological significance of the place of certain sonnets. I've never found this kind of thing convincing before, and it's heartening to finally tune in to the Elizabethan preoccupation with numbers.

I've also been turning the pages of the very latest Prog magazine. I surprised myself in buying this the other day at full price, but it's got an article by Sid Smith on the making of Close to the Edge which prompted me to part with the shekels. Happily it also came with a free CD with some tasty pieces on by more recent exponents of music's most derided genre than the mighty Yes, so that helped ease the pain of purchase. Most of the writing reflects silly fan-boy enthusiasm but that'll do for me nicely.