New books

"Of late, however, although the transition had been so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the dining hall--the sanatorium's main attraction, the pride of its brochure--which were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life itself, which so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health"--The Magic Mountain

On Youtube, in addition to Spitting Image, I've started watching  Longstreet, a 1971 single-season TV show with James Franciscus as a blind detective(!). I remember seeing the pilot at the time, in which his wife was killed by a bomb meant for him and he was left blind.  There was this really sad moment where he got out of his hospital bed and made a scene, his dead eyes bandaged.  Bruce Lee turns up as a martial arts teacher.  I think there's an episode where a bad guy attacks him and he turns out the lights.  Even the less popular shows from that time seem more interesting than most of today's Big Three network stuff!

With The Magic Mountain finished, I've started some new books.  One is Barbara Tuchman's 14th century history A Distant Mirror for the History Discussion Group.  Another is Felix Salten's Bambi for the Classic Book Club. (It's a lot shorter, and I should finish it pretty quick.) And I've started the fourth and last volume of Shigeru Mizuki's manga history of Shouwa Japan-cum-personal memoir, focusing on the period between 1953 and 1989.

Tonight the Nonfiction Book Club met at Jack Astor's to discuss what we're reading just now.  I brought Tuchman and the manga and that gave me enough to talk about.

The internet signal was off for most of today.  We even had trouble with the cable TV connection!  While waiting for it to come back, I finished translating the poem "Desiderata" into Japanese. (I've already translated it into Scots, French and Chinese.)