flemmings | (no subject)

Buoyed by my shopping trip last week, today I rollatored the equal distance to the laundromat to wash my duvet cover. Then walked the two blocks down to the super, did a shop there, walked back up to put my duvet in the dryer, and home to put frozen stuff in the freezer. And that, as far as my knees and elbows were concerned, was it. But I still had to go back to the laundromat and come home, cursing all the way. I moved more last year when I was working, is the only reason I can think of for this debilitation. So of course I need to walk more now and if I can't walk (snow) then I need to move more in the house (housework.) What I want to do is go from bed potatodom to couch potatodom and back, and I mustn't. Glum.

Last finished?

Milne (yes, A. A.), The Red House Mystery
-- these mysteries that I'm assured are Best In Show and classics are well enough and a pleasant change from my other reading, but not knock-socks-off

Reading now?

Everything else. Cohn is still with the messianic movements in Germany, Montaigne is still Montaigne, and Kipling.... I would have finished him by now but his autobiographical sketch, Something of Myself, made me me want to go play Addiction Solitaire and read Facebook instead. Between 'my good friend the far-sighted Cecil Rhodes', the what-about-ism of 'people criticize England for exploiting India but what about the 16 year old drudges they pay a pittance to fetch their bathwater up three flights of stairs, what about them, huh?' and the classic 'The Irish are born haters, they hate everyone, that's the only reason they hate us, obviously', I conclude that I wouldn't want to make Kipling's acquaintance. Add to that his utterly opaque descriptions of various things like the Boer War, where you clearly have to know what he's saying to know what he's saying, and if the elisions and obscurity mean nothing to you, well clearly you're not one of the elect. Pity. I used to think well of him.

Next?

More of same. And there is no health within us.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I hear you.I want to hibernate too.

If one could at least meet people it would be easier, but one can't. What's the use of getting up if one can't get out and meet people?

Kipling was better than his politics. When he's operating at the highest level- as an artist- the politics tend to disappear. Something of Myself is a strange, very guarded book- the very opposite of a misery memoir. It leaves out most of the personal stuff- like his grief at the death of his daughter (from influenza) and his son (killed in the Great War).

Mh well, meaning that when he writes fiction (such as, say, The House Surgeon with its nice Jewish family whose father, if I'm reading it correctly, is actually allowed to be short with the bumptious narrator and his unthinking prejudices) Kipling is less likely to say things like '...I asked questions and learned that Punch (the magazine, which had objected to one of his poems) on this particular issue was- non-Aryan 'and German at that.' ...Israel is a race to leave alone. It abets disorder'? A good thing too, because the constant swipes at anyone not white English is really tiresome.

Yeah, he had the prejudices of his time, but he usually drops them when he's making art- or even questions them- as in the House Surgeon- or in The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat- where a bunch of well-connected chaps concoct an elaborate revenge on a magistrate who has made antisemitic remarks about one of their number.

That... is actually quite odd. People's ingrained beliefs don't usually get dropped when they write fiction. I mean, they're ingrained. And if they're not ingrained, why be anti-semitic in your nonfiction?

I'd say that in his fiction he's working from the imagination and in the non-fiction he's giving us his opinions- and our opinions are shallow- and disappear when we're start working at a deeper level.

My father-in-law had racist and homophobic views- but never acted on them when he was dealing with people. On the one hand he'd say that "Immigrants should all be sent back where they came from" and on the other he'd go out of his way to be nice to his Asian neighbours.