flemmings: (Default)
flemmings ([personal profile] flemmings) wrote2020-04-29 10:43 pm

The days grow shorter, not longer

Well, if you will stay up to 3 a.m. playing Addiction Solitaire, a prime depressive exercise, you can expect to sleep in till noon, thus curtailing the daylight hours considerably.

I made a carbonara for lunch-at-four, only the second pasta dish in six weeks. I carefully stocked up on lingiuini and rice but I'm really afraid to eat them, because starch is how I gain weight even when I'm moving more than I am now. Am not moving much: standing up is just too painful. But have resolved to exercise or stretch three times a day because it helps at least a little. I'm convinced I never do sufficient reps of any given exercise or hold stretches long enough, so at least I can do them more often?

Wednesday meme, uncut because DW won't let me handcode HTML

Finished?

Two from the kitchen shelves, finally:

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
-- read her early stuff in the 70s and was fantodded. Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Play it as It Lays viewed the world from the point of view of a migraineur: too much light, too much bright emptiness. Gave me a lifelong distaste for California that was confirmed in spades when I got there. LA is an agoraphobe's nightmare: wide wide streets like highways, low buildings on the faraway other side, *too much light, too much sky.* Fortunately Magical Thinking is more New York and thus readable. Not identifiable with, because I've never been married to someone for forty years, and losing a spouse is a lot different from losing a parent or a friend.

Edmund White, Inside a Pearl
-- another book that makes me want to turn to the east and say, 'I thank thee, Lord, that Thou hast not made me a New York writer.' I stan New York as I stan Paris, but I'm not sure I cae for the intellectual class in either of them.

Reading now?
Burnett, The Secret Garden
-- couch reading, picked up off someone's lawn to be reread in my old age, which is now. Liked it as a kid; can read it now but won't be keeping it.

Still plugging along with the Rights of Magicians and The City of Yes.

Next?
There's still a number of kitchen books that I don't really want to read: LeGuin's Lavinia, Teot's War, that novel about Hokusai's daughter. I should just put them in a stack for Later, when people aren't paranoid about catching plague from other peoples books. I think I want something nonfiction, even though those nonfics up there were in fact too personal. Pursuit of the Millennium is looking better and better. Nice dry history...

[identity profile] mallorys-camera.livejournal.com 2020-04-30 10:42 am (UTC)(link)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem and Play it as It Lays viewed the world from the point of view of a migraineur

Pretty brilliant description of Didion. I admire her prose for its crystalline efficiency, but I have never, ever warmed to her. And I actively disliked The Year of Magical Thinking. Though it did pretty neatly fold into my theory that in order to achieve great success in a lifetime, you have to be willing to open your doors to the gods of karma and entertain at least one massive tragedy.

[identity profile] flemmings.livejournal.com 2020-04-30 11:48 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't think one can warm to Didion any more than to Sontag. Their prose doesn't permit it. For which reason I neither liked nor disliked Magical Thinking. CS Lewis, whom I normally despise, did it so much better.

Short of wrapping oneself in cotton batten, even if you don't open yourself to the gods of karma, you're going to experience massive tragedy anyway. It is the blight man was born for. Being open just lets you use the experience for something.