Off the Cliff

I think I'm coming round to the idea that cataract surgery will be a *good* thing. 'You won't be crippled,' K said cheerfully to my preemptive moaning about the post-op days, 'you'll be blurred.' Well, I'm blurred already; surgery can't make it worse. This apropos of a Bach cantata recital I was going to tonight. Checked the time again online, only to discover it's tomorrow when I, for the first time in months, am sitting a small friend who's deemed too small to attend her sister's dance recital. The sign I saw a week ago doubtless said 'next Sunday', but blurry me read it as Saturday. Pfui.

So shall stay home and try to make more progress with The Bee-keeper's Apprentice, which mysteriously is not the fast romp a Holmes-involving story should be.

1. I've been cooking more and eating out less. It's very satisfying even when simple. Things like a poached egg on caraway rye bread spread with avocado; a few grinds of the pepper mill, a sprinkle of sea salt, and voila: Heaven. Or my stir fries, now I've learned how to handle the garlic (mash don't chop, fry with the ginger, then remove. Garlic dislikes me intensely.) Broccoli, mushrooms, celery, bok choy, and tofu. I have to freeze it almost immediately or else I'd eat a pot at a sitting.

But the downside of all this is dishes. Every day there are dishes. Somehow in the last fifteen years I've never had dishes in this quantity. I must practise daily Buddhist mindfulness and treat the dishes as an opportunity to wash dishes, much as I've sort of managed to treat flossing my teeth as an exercise in flossing teeth: the thing done for its own sake and not for the end goal. The end goal isn't worth it, really, so one dismisses that aspect and just does the thing itself.

I'd still love a dishwasher. In a renovated kitchen. With an attached powder room. In the rebuilt mudroom. Will be a while before the impermanence of downstairs toilets leads me to give up the dream of having one.

2. So I've been reading books on Buddhism for almost three months now. So far I respond best to the ones by easterners. The westerners talk as if they're selling something, and there's an awful lot of Self present for a religion that's all about the non-existence of the Self. There's no Self in the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, just a serene 'this is how it works.' Granted, the Dalai Lama is a bad place to start: he's teaching the graduate course, and a lot of the BA basics I got from westerners. Still.

Among the western examples is something called Just Add Buddha! subtitled 'Quick Buddhist Solutions for Hellish Bosses, Traffic Jams, Stubborn Spouses, and Other Annoyances of Everyday Life.' His solution for hellish bosses is to imagine yourself as your boss' mother, observing your little boy having a tantrum. 'You can't truly stay angry at toddlers. They're too puny and helpless. They lack a sense of their own failings.' Well maybe. But you can give them time outs until they cool off, and you can't do that with a screaming irrational adult.

His solution for barking dogs is to imagine you are Kanzeon 'the bodhisattva who hears the cries of the world'. 'You are to the barking dog as Kanzeon is to you: a being of enormous compassion and inconceivable powers.' This is bad enough. But worse: when you find yourself in times of trouble, follow the lead of the Lotus Sutra and call on the Bodhisattva:

repeat these words...

Eyes of compassion, observing sentient beings, assemble an immeasurable ocean of blessings

...And if you're really in trouble, don't worry about the whole of the verse, just cry "Kanzeon!" and feel comforted.

And no I say no I can't no. Guanyin maybe, Chenrezig or Kwanum or Avalokiteshvara if it wasn't such a mouthful. But Kanzeon to me is firmly and unmovably an ijiwaru-ppoi hermaphrodite who wears too much lipstick, and that's that.

3) My local library renovated and half its books disappeared, or so it seems. Luckily everything I want is at the branch down the street from work, even if half of it doesn't circulate. (The Judith Merrill collection buys *everything* SFF so nobody else has to, but it's a reference library. A pain.) To round out my DWJ reading I went there and snagged an armful of volumes I'd never heard of, plus those missing Brusts. Plowed through the Brusts doggedly and then turned to dessert. Dessert was a disappointment.

A Sudden Wild Magic was... odd. Didn't sound like her at all. The three stories in Shopping for a Spell touched that same puzzling thing I noticed in Black Maria: extreme paralysis in the face of social intruders and appalling behaviour. Granted a certain kind of Canadian niceness dislikes telling people to get out, we're still capable of saying no on occasion. DWJ's people don't say no. They are wet and a weed and ultimately irritating.

The stories in Unexpected Magic were a slog to start but got steadily better. I very much liked Everard's Ride. And loved the moment in Little Dot where the cat is sleeping happily on the guy's lap, 'and then, suddenly, there was this huge human woman's voice screaming "Len Iggmy son of Trey, la moor Tay Una!"' ie Gli enigmi sono tre, la morte una!

That in fact is how I first met Turandot, in a now vanished dress shop on Bloor Street whose BGM came from the classical radio station that was, just then, playing an ad for the Canadian Uproar sorry pardon Opera's fall season. It turned out to be the Apocalypse Now version (heads on poles, dirty mist, generic peasants as the population of Peking) and confirmed me as a fan for life.

Last weekend I read two DWJs inside 28 hours. Then I wanted to read The Merlin Conspiracy but vaguely recalled that it was a sort of sequel to Deep Secret. So I started reading Deep Secret on Sunday. I've been reading it all week, literally every night, and have only just finished it. Well it's a paperback-- but so was Charmed Life; and it's longish-- but so was Conrad's Fate. Maybe it's just a) an early work and b) a bit of a mess.

Whatever, I shall now read The Merlin Conspiracy and see if it makes more sense than it did oh when was it? six years ago?

Guys, there's this notion that we have separation of Church and State in this country. So why is Good Friday a national holiday? And why, in the name of all that's holy-more-or-less, are supermarkets in Toronto closed on Easter Sunday? The local indy, Fiesta, is an Italian operation in a largely Italian and Portugese community, so fine. The Loblaws chain, and especially the Loblaws on St Clair just south of the largely Jewish enclave of Forest Hill, is not a Catholic operation at all. So what gives?
( Side thoughts on Canuck holidays )
Whatever, I spent the Easter weekend reading DWJ-- Conrad's Fate after Enchanted Glass, mostly because I couldn't remember a thing about the former. Nor do I understand the complaint I read recently about the lack of Christopher in CF. There's a *lot* of Christopher in CF and no more likable than he ever was. Now I should reread something with grown-up Chrestomanci just to see how that bumptious youth grows into the dark and sinister-- err well, you know what I mean.

Bought the first volume of Wild Sheep Chase when I was in New York last fall, as I said then, 'just to see what Murakami reads like in Japanese. As suspected, he reads like tapwater, but less sociopathic tapwater than in English where the lack of affect reads very unsettling indeed.' I must have been thinking of another Murakami work, because for interest's sake this afternoon I had a look at the English version in Book City. I may have to buy it. Because *that*, my friends, is what a translation should be. It doesn't even read like tapwater.

(I probably didn't mean sociopath either. One must be as careful with psychiatric terms these days as one had to be with religious terminology in the Middle Ages. Homoousios, not Homoiousios, transsubstantial, not consubstantial. Whatever the tech term is for a blunted emotional range, distance from reality, and lack of empathy, then.)

Finished Eight Skilled Gentlemen. Not as cutesie coy as I remember Bridge of Birds, which is a plus. The plot umm rather calls to mind words like 'farrago' and 'gallimaufry' and possibly 'rodomontade' though the latter is surely wrong, in that it has everything plus the kitchen sink and didn't quite make sense in the end. But possibly Hughart's plots are like Hughart's descriptions of place: he can see what he's describing but it doesn't work for me.

However I could seriously have done without ( Atreus-like spoilers )

Given that Barry Hughart gives me moderate hives, there's no rational reason to be so pleased at having scored a copy of Eight Skilled Gentlemen from a new second-hand bookstore that's opened up in erstwhile Rochdale, in the very location that ohh, a mere forty years ago was the SCM Bookstore. (Note that my experience was quite different from the author of that article's, both in respect to the man he's talking about and the layout of the store. *I* don't remember any three storeys to SCM.)