"Feeling less hot, Dixon heard the band break into a tune he knew and liked; he had the notion that the tune was going to help out this scene and fix it permanently in his memory; he felt romantically excited. But he'd got no business to feel that, had he? What was he doing here, after all? Where was it all going to lead? Whatever it was leading towards, it was certainly leading away from the course his life had been pursuing for the last eight months, and this thought justified his excitement and filled him with reassurance and hope. All positive change was good; standing still, growing to the spot, was always bad. He remembered somebody once showing him a poem which ended something like 'Accepting dearth, the shadow of death.' That was right; not 'experiencing dearth,' which happened to everybody. The one indispensable answer to an environment bristling with people and things one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could think they were bad. The reason why Prometheus couldn't get away from his vulture that he was keen on it, and not the other way round"--Lucky Jim
"A Blackfoot friend once told me that 'enfranchised' was French for 'screwed.' It's only funny if you're Indian. Even then, it's not that funny"--The Inconvenient Indian
I finished Lucky Jim a few days ago and started reading Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian for next month's History Meetup. It's pretty perceptive.
On Youtube I found a season of the BBC Great Railway Journeys devoted to Canada. The first episodes went between Halifax and Quebec City and there were some places I knew from my youth in the Maritimes.
For a change, my online music theory group met today, on Tuesday afternoon instead of Friday. And my online karaoke group met on Sunday afternoon!
"Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad"--Lucky Jim
"The mother had wished to prevent the father from, as she said, 'so much as looking' at the child; the father's plea was that the mother's lightest touch was 'simply contamination.' These were the opposed principles in which Maisie was to be educated—she was to fit them together as she might. Nothing could have been more touching at first than her failure to suspect the ordeal that awaited her little unspotted soul. There were persons horrified to think what those in charge of it would combine to try to make of it: no one could conceive in advance that they would be able to make nothing ill"--What Maisie Knew
On Monday (I think) we had to carry out dozens of buckets of water that had accumulated in our new cellar so John could work on the plumbing for our new shower there.
I finished the book about Afghanistan history so now I can focus on finishing Lucky Jim.
Thursday my History Meetup discussed Afghanistan. The following night the watch party showed John Huston's movie of Rudyard Kipling's Afghanistan-related story The Man Who Would Be King (which I'd read earlier in the week). I'd seen the movie before but forgotten how good it was! Sean Connery and Michael Caine have perfect chemistry.
Tonight I attended the Quiet Passion Literature Meetup through zoom.com . We read out loud the first pages of Henry James' What Maisie Knew. It was fun. (We may do D.H. Lawrence or Edith Wharton next week.)
Last Wednesday and Thursday nights I found two interesting Zoom Meetups discussing art and cinema.
Friday night I saw Anthony Mann's 1964 epic The Fall of the Roman Empire (for the second time) with my watch party. It's intelligent but often awkward. Unfortunately, the streamed version was letterboxed and at least half an hour shorter than the one I'd seen on DVD. I couldn't help comparing it to today's America: Livius (Stephen Boyd) was like Bernie Sanders--a bit too principled and not self-serving enough--and Emperor Commodus (Christopher Plummer) resembled Donald Trump. Nice elegiac music by Dmitri Tiomkin.
John's so clever! He arranged a system with a plank and a lifting blanket that's made it a lot easier to move Father from his bed to his chair. Now we've ordered a swivel he can stand on so he won't have to turn by himself.
Last weekend I had a big headache! It must have been from the changing weather.
