Off the Cliff

Did Kipling really write an inordinate number of weird tales or is it just that this collection has them all? The illustration on the spine is The Phantom Rickshaw, and so far there's also "They" and The Mark of the Beast and The House Surgeon and The Return of Imray.  (But not, luckily, A Madonna of the Trenches, or The Luck House either.) Somehow I thought Kipling had written book after book about the army in India, but evidently not.

 I must have been channeling zeitgeist, because I was awake at 7 a.m., irrevocably dry-eyed awake a mere six hours after going to bed. To bed, note, not to sleep, because it takes me 45 minutes to fall asleep. So I did double the usual number of exercises and had breakfast at a normal hour. And the day's Event passed off without fuss. I'm not used to living in Normal any more. It feels most peculiar. And of course, it's only superficially normal. Abnormal is still around, still screaming that their führer wuz robbed. But for now, some things are getting yanked back on track.

Finished?

Raverat, Period Piece
-- growing up in Cambridge in the 1890s. And whatever was happening in the haute and demi monde, Raverat (née Darwin) makes it clear to me that the middle classes were still bound by a stifling puritanism. Maybe not the Darwin sons, per se, but their wives, yes indeed.

Basho, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and other travel sketches
-- now must go look at another translation to see what his poems really say, because Yuasa's four line expansions really annoy me.

Reading now?

Coupla doorstoppers as a months-long reading project

Montaigne, Essays, and Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium

Sacks, Hallucinations
-- because an acrostic I did was an excerpt in which he once saw the colour indigo in the Egyptian collection at the Met as a result of hearing Monteverdi there, but never saw it again. Sacks is an easy author: goes down easily, even on a tablet

Kipling, A Selection of His Stories and Poems
-- vol 2, bought 2nd hand years back. I've probably read at least half of these before but he's good dipping reading. Though not nearly as easy as Sacks.

Next?

I think I have enough to be going on with.

Awake early again, this time because of garbage trucks picking up Christmas trees. Can no longer tell if bangs are coming from the street or from next door rummaging through the clothes closet on the other side of my bedroom wall. I think it's mostly the street, though, because Thursdays are rife with the rumbling of garbage wheelies from those early bird people who are actually up early enough to put the bin out in the a.m. rather than the night before like (ahem) almost everyone else.

Have the quiet cough and sudden violent sneezes of allergy time. I put this down to our above-zero temps, but I know I get them even when there's a polar vortex happening. The cook from work came round to pick up a bag of winter clothing for a drive happening at the local gay community centre. 'Farewell my old coat,' the one I wore in the mid-90s, still respectable because it's a heavy duffle coat I traded for something lighter the minute I could. Also a set of long johns I won't wear, and some jogging pants that swim on me now, and such like. Cook no longer has a kitchen to cook in because when they opened up after five months closed, the kitchen cabinets were covered in mould, so everything had to be ripped out, and then the laundry room as well for the same reason. No wonder she and I both suffered from sinus problems; and after that there's the vents that have never been cleaned in 15 years. But there you have half the reason last year's allergy seasons were a stroll in the park. (Of course, there's the matter of the dust in my own house, but that comes through the windows as much as the vents.)

Other consolation was discovering that Period Piece, Gwen Raverat's memoir of her Cambridge childhood as a granddaughter of Charles Darwin, is up on Gutenberg. Am reading it now, but had forgotten how very English it is in its felt need to start by introducing her ancestors in detail before telling about her personal experiences. Not quite 'My great-grandfather was Josiah Blenkinsop who married a Miss Kitty Fisher, the daughter of a Suffolk gentleman farmer. The Fishers had inhabited the village of Worpington-on-the-Slough since the time of Richard the first, while the Blenkinsops were yeoman farmers from Little Uppity in neighbouring Essex...' but close.