Earlier today, with her usual perspicacity, Noi remarked on the dominating feature of life in our comfortably working abode in KL: It's very peaceful here. And it is, to the point you forget we've actually got neighbours here on the taman. Must say, this suits my present mood which is one more than ready to embrace the easy quietude of it all. Even my musical choices today have tended in the direction of the gentle and mellifluous. I'm now playing Dylan's magisterially sleepy-headed Shadows in the Night, a disk worth the admission fee just for Donny Herron's utterly beguilingly gorgeous pedal steel, rightly prominent on every cut. If this isn't the perfect choice for late-night listening when you're licking the wounds of the day I'd like to know what is.
The problem in all this is that it's just so easy to give oneself up to the ease of it all. I need to force myself to get stuff done. And I'm not just talking about work-related matters, which, funnily enough, I've had no problem getting on with for a couple of hours today simply because I'm accountable for it and it has to be done. It's the unaccountable that needs the willpower to get moving on.
To which end I've been persevering on Stephen Kotkin's Stalin: Paradoxes of Power 1878 - 1928. This is the first volume in the writer's acclaimed three volume bio of the Russian tyrant and it's easy to see where the acclaim comes from. The detail Kotkin provides is overwhelming in a good way - you know this is the real deal in terms of in-depth research and it feels (if that's the right word) insightful. The problem is that the reader has to provide enough energy to live-up to that of the writer and it's hard (but rewarding) work.
In tandem with the bio I'm also starting out on yet another novel I really should have read years ago but somehow didn't. I'm ashamed to admit I've never read anything by Stendhal and I'm now rectifying the omission with The Red and the Black. It's about time.
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