Uneasy Reading

Making slow progress in Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878 - 1928, but the brilliantly dense text isn't exactly made for speed reading. It's now November 1919 and somehow the Bolshevik regime has survived. The extreme ruthlessness of Messrs Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin et al has had a lot to do with survival, but sheer good luck has made a major contribution. If I ever feel the need to remind myself that history is basically a mess then rereading Kotkin's account of the revolutions in Russia and the war that followed will certainly do the trick.

And if the reader had ever suffered in any degree from some kind of hero-worship of any of the major players, this is the book to cure them.

New Ways Of Thinking

In a meeting this morning a colleague referred to AI snobs. I think she was talking about people who automatically look down on anything generated through some form of artificial intelligence. It seems this is the default position of quite a number of young people.

Odd really. The idea that AI might be capable of producing something of genuine artistic value seems to me very exciting. Also very disturbing. But not something to regard with a kind of weary contempt.

Almost Forgotten

For some reason I found myself today thinking of the significance of this date for me when I was a kid more than I normally do. And it was very clear that my memories of Bonfire Night and its attendant excitements are very patchy indeed. A search on YouTube for something that would stir the embers of memory proved fruitless. Whatever's on there is just vaguely generic, pointlessly nostalgic.

Perhaps such poverty of recall isn't such a bad thing. Some things are best left behind.

The Results Are In

Not quite sure whether it was the United comeback against Roma or the midterms wipeout of POTUS & his minions made me happier today. On balance, probably the news out of the US. But in the sober darkness of evening it strikes me that it's by no impossible that both may signal a false dawn. Still, best to enjoy the moment, eh?

Senses Dulled

Started reading Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy as a follow-up to The Red and the Black. I roundly detest Waugh as a personality whilst hugely admiring the early novels, especially Vile Bodies, At one time I rated Brideshead Revisited highly, but came to think that the Catholic aspects just don't work - it all seems a bit performative to me, as does the Catholicism of Guy Crouchback, the central figure in the war trilogy, at least from my reading so far. But these are early days and the war has hardly got going.

In fact the opening chapters struck me as pleasingly dull, in contrast to the high energy of Stendhal who absolutely demands alertness in every paragraph. Sometimes you need to read something that plods along as a way of winding down, and that certainly suits my mood as things stand.

Of Good Cheer

Life has been pleasantly smooth-sailing of late. Not quite what I expected at this time of year, but very welcome. So today was a day for feeling very cheerful indeed. 

But even if things hadn't been quite so tickety-boo, one look at the picture of Arissa above would have made the world an unreasonably cheerful place. (Books courtesy of the vouchers I get for my involvement in the annual lit seminar.)

Full Of Surprises

So much of Stendhal's The Red and the Black took me by surprise that I just don't know where to start in summing up how I felt reading the novel. This is true simply at the level of story: I had no idea what was going to happen next right up to the final lines, which floored me. And it's true at the more sophisticated level of style: I couldn't figure out whether Stendhal just didn't know what he was doing and was making it up as he went along; or if the constant shifting of point of view and consequent ironies was cunningly, meaningfully, crafted from the get-go in every particular.

How does a writer manage to create a central character so entirely despicable, yet wonderfully sympathetic?

And how does a reader process a work that defies all categorisation?

Happy Families

Spent the best part of the evening at Fafa's, with baby Arissa as the centre of attention, though Fifi technically was the birthday girl. Mei was able to join us in celebrating the joys of being entirely silly and having an aimlessly jolly time. All in all we didn't do anything much and did it really well. There's a lot to be said for being pointlessly happy.

A Synchronicity

I'm not sure it's reasonable of me to invoke Jung's acausal connecting principle regarding what happened to me today, but I do know that a distinct spookiness embraced me for a good twenty minutes or so in the middle of the day, and still lingers. But perhaps the whole thing can be simply put down to YouTube's algorithm getting it right for once.

To explain my experience I need to go back to Wednesday and a conversation I had with Maria which touched upon the notion of Beauty. I'd semi-playfully referenced the on-going War on Beauty to her and she rightly asked me what exactly I meant by Beauty. I brilliantly avoided directly answering her question by seeking to look appropriately wise and saying something evasive. But later in the day I felt a bit guilty about this and started thinking of how I might provide some kind of genuinely fruitful answer. Which in turn got me thinking about the conversation between Stephen Dedalus and his chum Lynch in Joyce's A Portrait referencing Aquinas's thoughts on the subject. Since Maria is essentially a good Catholic girl this seemed a particularly appropriate place to start; plus it remains my own reference point for understanding a concept which happily lies beyond my limited understanding.

Anyway, I've not seen Maria since but I thought I'd better reread the apposite pages from Chapter 5 just to check if they remained as brilliantly illuminating as I remembered them. So I read them around 10.00 am today, sitting in the library as it happens, and, my goodness, they were better than ever. And, then, to some small astonishment from myself, around noon, a lecture with the unlikely title Islamic Influences on James Joyce popped up in the YouTube feed on my phone.

It took me roughly 10 minutes into Tim Winter's talk to realise that some five decades of thinking on my part about Joyce's art, including Stephen & Lynch's momentous dialogue, was coalescing into a series of insights that I can only characterise as deeply exciting. And now, having listened to the full lecture I find the initial excitement hasn't really subsided, but transformed, as these things do into something rich and strange.

Still processing.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, in between and around all this I did get quite a bit of work done.)

A Matter Of Fact

Now taking a break after polishing off a plateful of Noi's patented nasi goreng ikan bilis (with fried egg on top.) Seconds are happily available and will be coming soon. Frankly speaking, it doesn't get much better than this. Fact.