Catching Up

When you find yourself reading the 15 August 2019 edition of The New York Review of Books in late January of the next year, you know you've got a bit of catching-up to do. As I'm reading I'm struck by how interesting the edition is, so it's not as if there was anything that put me off reading it when I first got hold of it.

I suppose I could claim I've been busy, but when has there been a time I haven't been busy? I suspect that time I used to spend reading my journals has been eaten up by reading stuff on-line. Indeed, oftentimes it's the same stuff. But - and this is the genuinely odd thing - I suspect I read the hard-copy versions with greater concentration, somehow in greater depth.

And often with more excitement than I feel reading on-line. For example, there's an excellent highly enthusiastic piece on a Swedish poet named Harry Martinson and a sort of epic poem he wrote in the 1950s set in space entitled Aniara: A Review of Man in Time and Space that got me considerably fired-up. It seems there's also an opera based on the poem and a recent film, along with other miscellaneous responses. I'm now thinking of a way to expose myself to the work in one of its guises.