That moment as you slake your thirst with cool, hard water biting through the accumulated drudgery of deep-breathing dreary effort. A reward worth all the sweat unleashed to achieve. Almost as good as the first sip of liquid after a day of fasting.
Good to have the opportunity to experience both.
The plan had been for me to hit the gym this evening, but that's been shelved. For no particular reason I'm aware of the nerves on the outward side of my left leg, the upper bit, decided to announce they are in pain from early this morning, and said pain has failed to settle down, remaining sharp & debilitating. I'm hoping that this eases by tomorrow, but previous experience suggests these attacks are unpredictable in terms of ferocity and duration.
I've had no choice but to take things very gently today, and in some ways have enjoyed doing so. Read a couple of pages of Finnegans Wake, Tennyson's A Dream of Fair Women, and a fair few pages from both Kotkin's Stalin bio and Waugh's The Sword of Honour, so the day hasn't been wasted, but I've also drifted into aimless dozing more than once.
Oh, and I've basked in Bill Frissell's Good Dog, Happy Man, which I've never heard before, and discovered a new composer, one Anna Sigríður Þorvaldsdóttir. She's Icelandic and sensationally good, but not in a pretty way. (The music, I mean, not the lady.)
So, all in all, on a day when not much has happened, there's been plenty going on, if you see what I mean.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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?
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.
