books
Be in Clean Life and turn thy face towards the east
A cold, rainy day here in New York, and not a whole lot to report. I started reading Fifth Business by Robertson Davies this morning, but I’m really not far enough along in it to have formed an opinion. I like it so far, though, and it comes well recommended, so we’ll see. It seemed sufficiently different from the last book I read.
But beyond that? Just cold and rainy.
Today’s Forgotten English calendar page is fun, though, offering “an excellent way to get a fairy” (at least according to a late 1600s manuscript in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum). It suggests that one
…get a broad, square crystal, in length and breadth three inches, and lay it in the blood of a hen three Wednesdays or three Fridays. Then take it out and wash it in Holy Water and fumigate it. Then take three hazel rods of a year’s growth, peel them fair and white, and write the fairy’s name (which you call three times) on every stick being made flat one side. Then bury them under some hill whereas you suppose fairies haunt the Wednesday before you call her; and the Friday following, call her three times at eight, or three, or ten of the clock. But when you call, be in Clean Life and turn thy face towards the east; and when you have her, bind her in that crystal.
Is that all? Well, tomorrow’s Wednesday, so I better get cracking!
A mid-May Monday
Back to work today, for a pretty typical Monday. I got into the office slightly later than expected when I missed my morning train. I was running a little late already, but then I got halfway down the block when I realized I had forgotten my wallet. I doubled back, but that meant that I wouldn’t be on the 8:15 train.
And that’s about the height of the excitement for today.
I did have a slightly weird experience when a potential reviewer, who I’d e-mailed earlier that day about an art therapy proposal sitting on my desk, asked if it was me who had posted something to Twitter that morning. This, specifically. I’d had at least two art therapists in quick succession turn down doing reviews, or I’d had e-mails bounce back from them, because they were on sabbatical. This reviewer found my post by searching for art therapy news, which she does regularly, and she thought it was funny enough to ask me about it. I don’t actively hide my weblog or Twitterings from co-workers and people I work with outside the office, but it is a little odd when they find them on their own.
The only other thing I really did today was finish reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. It was okay. My opinion of it largely matches up with Betty’s, I think, namely that there’s stuff to like about the book, and the title character is certainly interesting, but it really does not live up to the hype. I think it’s incredible success is due to a number of things not entirely related to the contents of the book. It hits upon some current hot-button topics, like financial crime and faltering economies, and marries that to a procedural crime novel. The fact that it’s a translation lends it a bit of mystique and prestige, at least here in the US, as does the fact that it (along with its two sequels) were released posthumously. Again, the book itself has its fair share of moments, but I found long stretches of it slightly boring and thought some characters could have been easily excised. Its incredible success is also a little baffling.
Oh, and for those of you wondering about my mom, she’s feeling a lot better. She was up and around for the first time over the weekend, and she’s got the all-clear from her doctor. She’s still tired and not too hungry, but the worst of the pneumonia seems to be past. Thanks for the well-wishes, all!
Wednesday
It was unseasonably cold here today. Maybe not as cold as in some parts — my father said yesterday the news was reporting snow in my old central Pennsylvanian stomping grounds — but chilly nevertheless. My mom is still sick, but with the confirmation today that it is pneumonia, we’re hoping that rest and antibiotics will have her feeling better soon.
Meanwhile, my day was about the same as yesterday, except for a “brown bag” lunch we had at work today. We have these on occasion, where they invite a guest speaker and give everyone who attends the talk a free lunch of sandwiches or pizza. Today was the latter, and a talk on book publicity. It turned out to be a fairly interesting topic, with an engaging speaker — neither of which are guaranteed when attending these things. Of course, it was helped along by visual aids that included a clip of one of his authors on The Colbert Report. But hey, that and free pizza ain’t half bad.
In other news, I stayed up much too late last night watching yesterday’s episode of Lost, which a lot of people seem to have really hated. Honestly, I can see where they’re coming from — it focuses on two (relatively) minor characters and offers a lot of non-answers (or simply more questions) as answers for the show’s central mysteries — but the truth is, I really liked it. There are plenty of answers I wish it had given, plenty of mysteries that I wish had been explained. But I keep coming back to something Noel Murray wrote in a comment to his AV Club review:
For me it goes back to the idea that the story keeps repeating. It doesn’t “explain” anything necessarily — if anything, it raises more questions — but in a show where incidents and images and lines recur, the idea that even the central “hero” and “villain” of the piece come from a fractured background just like the 815ers makes the endgame more meaningful. It’s no longer a war between Good God and Bad God. It’s just a continuation of an ancient struggle that makes even the people who claim to be doing the right thing into terrible, terrible people.
Lots of people, including Murray, have been insisting for a long time that the show can’t help but disappoint in its final season, that anyone looking for some perfect closure or understanding of exactly what happened is going to be let down. I think “Across the Sea” may be the first time that’s really sinking in for some folks.
Me, I really enjoyed the episode. I don’t know yet what exactly it means for the last few hours to come, but I’m eager to find out.
Tuesday
So it looks like it’s probably pneumonia, which will hopefully respond to antibiotics and start to pass. I think my mother’s been feeling pretty miserable the past couple of days, certainly since we got home from Maryland on Sunday.
My day, by comparison, was pretty standard. I got the okay for our company’s “summer hours,” whereby I’ll work from 8:30 to 5:15 four days a week in order to leave at one o’clock on Fridays. It doesn’t go into effect until mid-July, but I stayed until 5:15 today to make sure it still left me enough time to make my regular train. And it does, if only just. I probably won’t often get a seat on that train, but that’s okay. Standing is sometimes better for my back, and it does mean I get to read more instead of nodding off in the evening — which I do all too often. I’m still reading The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, which is a weird mix of genres, not all of them super-exciting, but I am enjoying it so far, some three hundred pages in.
Other than that, not much to report.