Finished THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

I finished The Count of Monte Cristo a few days ago.  Now I'm working on a Coles Notes version (Cliff Notes for you Americans) summarizing the plot and the characters just to sort it all out in my mind!

I'm now reading The Republic for Which It Stands, a history of the U.S.A. in the Gilded Age after the Civil War, for next month's History Meetup.

Saw Ridley Scott's Napoleon movie with John P. and Debbie a few weeks ago.  It wasn't boring, but his relationship with Josephine wasn't really convincing. (Maybe they should make a movie centred on Josephine...)

Betty from my memoir group took me to lunch Sunday.  She tells some incredible stories--I think she could write a book!

Last night at the historical movie watch party I actually showed a movie I hadn't seen before:  the 1938 MGM Johann Strauss bio-pic The Great Waltz.  It wasn't so great:  the sort of movie where the hero falls for the Fast Girl but in the end she sends him back to the Nice Girl...

Sturmfrei

    My sister went to Kingston, so I'm on my own for a week or two.  Germans call that feeling of freedom when you're alone in the house sturmfrei.  I learned that from a YouTube video about German words without exact English translations. (Another is hoenigkuchepferd, which means "smiling like a gingerbread horse," referring to its wide icing smile, a bit like "grinning like the Cheshire Cat.")

    We used to have a 241 Pizza around the corner, but it closed during the Covid slump.  The neighbourhood now has a Little Caesar's, but they don't have as much variety.  There's also a Pizza Pizza, but I can't eat that:  it literally makes me sick!  Now I've found a new 241 over on Dufferin Street, and I walked there and back on Saturday to buy myself a small pizza that lasted two days. (I could have taken the streetcar, but I wanted the exercise.)

    Last month I saw John Carpenter's paranoia movie They Live for the first time.  Two weeks ago John and I saw Martin Scorsese's Killers of the August Moon, which I found rather long and depressing, not unlike his earlier The Irishman. Last week we also saw a documentary about Napoleon's artistic legacy. (On the way to the documentary, I saw a pro-Palestinian rally at Bloor & Yonge.)

    Last week I had lunch with Debbie and Maria at the nearby WhataBagel.  Afterward Maria and I walked through the neighbourhood, and I showed her Wychwood Park.  She enjoyed the sights greatly.

    For next month's History Meetup, I want to read Jonathan Spence's short biography of Mao Zedong.  Unfortunately, the Toronto library website has been taken down because of a ransomware attack!

    My DVD player has gone bust, or the connection to it or something.  I've tried to set up the downstairs player in my room but it didn't work so (surprise, surprise) I had to ask Donald to come over and figure it out!  For last week's movie, Fritz Lang's noirish western Rancho Notorious, it was on YouTube and I shared it from there.  For this week's movie Boogie Nights, I'll use Google Play like I used to.

    The newspaper this morning (we subscribe to The Globe and Mail) was soaked through in the pouring rain.  They usually have a plastic covering for it, but today they must have run out of them!

Creepy October movies

"Baby, I ain't holding your hand!"--The Evil Dead II:  Dead by Dawn

    The cool weather's finally arrived.  I've started wearing sweaters again, though I don't really need them yet.  Yesterday my Monday afternoon memoir piece group met in person for the first time in a while.  We sat in Sylvie's back yard, where she'd lit a bonfire in an outdoor stove to keep us warm!

    I'm about halfway through The Count of Monte Cristo.  I've now started reading Essential History of the Crimean War for my History Meetup.  I could only find it in Ebook form, so when I'm on the subway I'm reading The Loom of Languages, which has some big word lists for Greek and Germanic and Romance languages.

    Three weeks ago I showed There Will Be Blood in my Friday historical movie watch party--or would have, but I forgot that my computer's regular DVD player didn't work in Zoom sharing (no picture)! Now I have the VLC app which does work, and I'm showing the movie again this week.  Just as well that I'm seeing it again, since parts of it confused me, like Paul Dano playing twin characters.  They could at least have given one of them a moustache or glasses or something so we could distinguish them more easily, but maybe they wanted to make it more "challenging"...

    The other week Debbie and I had lunch at the Indian buffet restaurant Aroma.  I ate so much that when I got home I had to spend the rest of the afternoon in bed!  Maybe next time we'll do something simpler, like Whatabagel...

    I recently saw Kenneth Branagh's Agatha Christie movie A Haunting in Venice. at the Yorkdale, where I hadn't been since the B.C. era (before Covid). Pretty good, but for me the definitive Hercule Poirot is Peter Ustinov. (Ain't I finicky?) For what it's worth, I guessed who the culprit was.  At the food court afterward, along with dinner, I had a milkshake for the first time in donkey's years.

    Last week I saw Hitchcock's The Birds (for the second time) at the Yonge & Dundas.  While well-made, movies like this one and The Exorcist leave me oddly cold.  It's different with Psycho and Silence of the Lambs:  as crazy as those stories are, at least I could (just barely) imagine them happening in real life.  I suppose The Birds reflects the fears of the Cold War era, sort of like Signs deals with the fears of a post-9/11 America...

    Today I saw the cartoonish horror comedy The Evil Dead II:  Dead by Dawn at the same place, this time for the first time. (I haven't seen the first Evil Dead, but I did see the "threequel" Army of Darkness--I think I want to see it again.) It's surprisingly stylish and witty, and Bruce Campbell is pretty cool:  you could say his motto is "It works for me." I should also see Gremlins 2 and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 someday...

THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO

    I finished An American Tragedy (powerful), and now I'm reading the Ebook of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo.  I read it years ago but that was an abridged edition, and this is the full Penguin Classics version.  Dumas knew how to tell a story!  Believe it or not, in my childhood I first encountered the story in a Mister Magoo version, part of a series where he starred in classic stories. (His version of A Christmas Carol is pretty good.)

    I'm also reading A Short History of the Hundred Years War for my History Meetup.  Last week I had lunch with Maria and Sergey for the first time in months, and Maria was fascinated by my book.

    A few weeks ago we saw A Very British Scandal, about the Duchess of Argyll's divorce where her husband introduced evidence of her promiscuity in an early example of "revenge porn." He was not a gentleman! (It's a sequel to A Very English Scandal, with a very creepy Hugh Grant as Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe.)

    My new computer didn't have an outlet that my DVD player fit into, so I continued to use my old one for Friday night watch parties.  That machine works slowly so last week (we were showing Elmer Gantry) I set up everything early and it looked like we'd start on time--but then the computer conked out and I had to restart it, then reopen the browser, then reopen the webpage with the Zoom link, then reopen Zoom... all of which took almost half an hour, and two viewers didn't come back!  

    So on Tuesday I went to Best Buy to get a connection so I can use my DVD player on the new computer.  I brought the player and a cable from the new computer to show what I needed, but first I got a haircut.  When I got to Best Buy, it turned out I'd left that cable in the Barber Shop, so I had to return and get it. (I'm just glad I hadn't left it on the streetcar!) The next day I went there with the cable and bought the connection I needed, so now the player does work on my new computer.  All's well that ends well.

    I've started watching the anime revival Dragon Ball Super.  It's harmless entertainment.

New Computer!

On a doctor: "In constant touch with all phases of ignorance and dereliction as well as sobriety, energy, conservatism, success and the like, he was more inclined, where fact appeared to nullify his early conclusion in regard to many things, to suspend judgment between the alleged claims of heaven and hell and leave it there suspended and undisturbed"--An American Tragedy

My generous brother Donald bought me a new computer and set it up on Sunday! (He did the same for Moira.) My old computer, which I'd had for seven years, was a Catalina 10.15.7, while the new one is Ventura 13.5.1.

I needed a new computer because my keyboard connection was acting up.  The shift and return keys weren't working. I could still use the caps lock for the upper case, but not stuff like ! and $, and my brackets had to be square.  And to make a line break I had to press the tab key repeatedly.  Several times it had gone like this for a couple of days then gone back, but eventually it stayed that way.  That's why I haven't been writing on this blog for the last month...

Last month I saw Oppenheimer at the Varsity with John P.  Pretty good but too long and loud, and the music was intrusive.  The other week I saw a documentary about the making of Elvis Presley's terrific 1968 TV special at the Yonge & Dundas.  Thursday I had lunch with Debi at the Mandarin buffet restaurant, and of course I ate a whole dinner's worth.

I finished translating the Korean book about Lincoln and started on the one about Gauguin's art. I went to the place where I bought them and got some Korean translations of Japanese manga:  the first two volumes of the teenage romance Honey and a volume of Dragon Ball (with the end of the Cell saga).  I've also started translating them, though their language is slangier and more difficult.

Speaking of Korea, Moira and I just saw the terrific first season of Pachinko, based on Min Jin Lee's novel about a Korean family living in Japan.  Now I'll definitely have to read the book:  I can't wait for the next season!  But I checked on the Toronto library website and they have about 60 copies and 200 holds. (Book clubs must be reading it.) Some great storytelling...

I read a short Thomas Keneally biography of Lincoln, the subject of next month's History Meetup. (For good measure, I read Michael Korda's short biography of Ulysses Grant.) I'm also reading Theodore Dreiser's mega-novel An American Tragedy, which sort of took that Horatio Alger trope--a young man in the city shows his virtue and ends up in a position of upward mobility--and turned it inside out!  If I didn't already know how the story would go, I probably couldn't bear to finish it, sort of like when my mother was reading Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles and couldn't get past the part where she was writing the letter to her fiance revealing that she wasn't a virgin...

The novel's chapters have numbers instead of their own titles, but I've started making a list of the chapters and giving them titles myself, a bit like the DVD feature that allows you to start a movie at an individual five-minute section and gives each one a heading.

Salsa on St. Clair

Last weekend my neighbourhood had the Salsa on St. Clair Festival.  It was pretty noisy, as usual.  I hoped that Maria and Sergey would come explore it with me, but Sergey squashed his finger on a subway door.  I was also hoping Debbie would come, but she'd just came back from the Rockies where she picked up Covid!

Moira is in Kingston just now, so I've been alone again.

Finally finished the history of the English Civil War.  Now I'm reading Jonathan Manthorpe's Forbidden Nation:  A History of Taiwan.

I recently had a dream where I was in a comedy and started thinking up all these funny things to happen.  If I could just get into that mindset when I'm awake I could write comedies!

Last week I saw Past Lives at the Varsity, a nice little movie about a Korean girl whose family moved to America, who makes online contact with a guy who knew her back in Korea and hasn't completely got over her.  It's the sort of movie Hollywood doesn't make...

In that Korean children's book I've been translating about Lincoln, I've got to the part where he's President!

DIE FLEDERMAUS

Last weekend I performed Die Fledermaus in the Toronto City Opera.  Tech rehearsal followed by dress rehearsal followed by three performances, all at the Fleck Dance Theatre in Harbourfront. (The dressing rooms have showers there!) I used my own black suit so they only had to give me a bow tie.  The "waiters" served us swiss rolls cut into small pieces--I now realize that's the only way to eat them!

On Wednesday I went to the Home Depot near St. Clair & Keele and brought a push mower! (We don't have a big enough lawn to justify the old power mower.) Mowing manually is a workout, but I prefer it to doing TV workouts.

That day the wildfire smoke reached Toronto again, and again I noticed the funny smell.  I also got my hair cut, and was so busy that I forgot to put out the trash bins!

We subscribed to Apple TV and just saw the documentary series Lincoln's Dilemma, about the abolition of slavery during the Civil War.

The past two Fridays I've shown Jan Troell's The Emigrants and The New Land at my historical movie watch party. (I saw it 40 years ago on PBS.) With the first one, the DVD player swallowed the disc and wouldn't play it, and I had to restart the computer, then I was slow getting into Zoom, so I was ten minutes late getting started!  But it was worth the wait.  I remembered the shipboard scene where Liv Ullmann detected lice on her body and went into hysterics, blaming a fellow passenger.

I've almost finished Diane Purkiss' long (though impressive) book about the English Civil War.  But I've run into a long chapter about the Levellers so I'll need a bit more patience...

Days of smoke

I like sleeping with my windows open!  Every spring I'm pleased when the weather gets warm enough for that....  But when I woke up Wednesday morning there was a funny smell in the air, like someone was boiling tar or barbecuing nearby.  It was the smoke from the wildfires in northern Ontario, which the wind has brought here to Toronto. (Now my windows are closed, alas.)

The smoke has also reached American cities like New York.  I wonder if this is another "Where were you when.." moment for the future, like 9/11 and the onset of covid?  It's amusing to see the American tabloid press blaming the smoke on us and ignoring that it's clearly a result of the climate change that the USA has promoted disproportionately, which some Americans are still in denial about.  Of course, someone online mentioned the South Park song "Blame Canada." I thought the South Park movie was thin and overrated, but I did like a line in that song, "They're not even a real country anyway." (Touche!  Canada's a "nation" for the post-nation era...)

A while ago I saw an article (in USA Today, not the highest intellectual forum) about school avoidance and people who want to class it as a mental health problem.  But there wasn't one word in it about why these kids can't cope with school, let alone how to make school more bearable for them.  This issue means something to me because back in the 1970s I was often a school avoider. (Someone said that one of the purposes of school is to "socialize" children, but I flunked socialization!)

Last night I had to leave opera rehearsal early because I had a big headache. The Die Fledermaus show's just a couple of weeks away, but Moira's helping me with learning the German lyrics. (She's the German expert.)

Doors Open

Last weekend I went to a few Doors Open Toronto locations.  Saturday I went with Maria and Sergey.  First we went to the Japan Foundation at its new place just east of Yonge & Bloor.

Then we went to Osgoode Hall, where Maria wanted to show us the fancy restaurant, but it turned out they'd closed it after the onset of Covid-19.  Then we went to the Textile Museum, where they had an exhibit of stuff by Iran-born Padina Bondar. (Maria is into crocheting herself, and loves to see weaving...) Sergey would have liked to see the University of Toronto's Physics Department, but we ran out of time.

As it is, we were lucky to go to Osgoode Hall first, since it closed a bit early at 4:30:  if we'd gone to the Textile Museum first, we wouldn't have had the chance to go there too.  And when we passed through Osgoode Hall station I happened to run into Gennivier, who I knew from twenty years ago when we were taking ballroom dancing lessons at the Arthur Murray studio!

Later we ordered from a food truck selling Indian, Nepalese and Tibetan food and ate on the steps outside the Student Learning Centre.

Sunday I just went to two places:  the Polish Combatants Hall for Polish-Canadian war veterans, and the Toronto Islamic Centre.  Looking at the displays of Polish World War II uniforms and such, I thought of my aunt Alma, who could never watch war movies because it was all too grim for her.  I could have found more places to go to, but the walking around was the important thing for me.  If I walk two miles three times a week, that'll bring me close to my aspiration of walking a mile a day!

I found the text online of Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator, and I've started translating it into Chinese!

My nephew Katie graduated from McMaster University and her convocation was this past week.

Busy week

"Why did they fire you?"
"Because they're idiots!"

--Blackberry

I don't eat out with people much, but this last week I did it four times!  On Tuesday I had lunch with Debbie at Thai Noodles, which was quite good. (Tuesday was also Moira's birthday, and we had the whole family over for Indian food!)

I'm now reading A Short History of the Phoenicians.

We got the garden planted, but when I planted the potatoes I got into the area where Moira had planted kale! (We'll have to plant some more of that.)

We just saw the Italian series Made in Italy on topic.com .  (It was a priority because they're taking it off at the end of the month.) It's about a young woman in 1970s Milan who gets a job at a fashion magazine.  A cute, handsome show, but oddly predictable:  even when I didn't guess what would happen next, I felt like I should have guessed it!

Friday Moira and I had lunch with Puitak and Gordon at the City Hall cafe.  We walked all the way downtown, which got me a bit closer to my daily mile ambition. (Some days I get to a full mile or even more, but on other days I barely get out of the house...)

Saturday I had dinner with Maria and Sergey.  We were going to eat at the Black Tulip Hungarian restaurant around the corner, but it turned out we needed a reservation! (It must be getting popular...) So we went to the Raahi Indian restaurant instead.  Afterward we came back to my house and we played Quiddler, that Scrabble-like card game.

Yesterday I saw Blackberry with John P. at the Varsity, the true story of the meteoric cellphone company. (First we went into the wrong theatre and saw the first minute of The Starling Girl!) It's an excellent movie, intelligent and witty with some particularly Canadian touches.  The executive played by Michael Ironside kept making me think of Burl Ives!  Now I want to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof again... 

Open window weather!

Last Friday I met Maria and Sergey for lunch, for the first time since Before Covid!

We've been watching Arctic Circle on topic.com .  It's about a policewoman in northern Finland dealing with cases that require working with the nearby Russians. (She has a daughter with Down's Syndrome.) The first season was a multiple murder case involving a dangerous virus with a potential for a worldwide Covid-type pandemic.  The second season, involving a Russian vigilante cult, is rather hard to swallow.

Nobody came to my History Meetup about Cuba.  But I'll try again with Phoenician history next month.

Wednesday I went to North York Central library to borrow A Short History of the Phoenicians, and there's a shop there where you can buy library discharge books cheap, so I picked up Korean children's books about Lincoln and Gauguin. (I've already started translating the Lincoln book!)

I also went to see my shrink, whom I almost missed:  I remembered his new address, but forgot which floor he was on!  I ended up walking up and down the stairs between eight floors, before finally finding him.  Oh well, I have a new ambition to start walking a mile a day.

I'm now rehearsing Die Fledermaus with the Toronto City Opera.  We did it about fifteen years ago at a time when I was playing the computer game Farmville, so this music reminds me a bit of that game.

Yesterday I bought the seeds and plants for our back yard garden.  Today I finally mowed the lawn, after a bee-friendly delay while the dandelions are blooming. (We're planting borage again, which the bees also like.)

Now that I've caught up with One Piece, I've started watching Dragonball Z again, this time dubbed.

Post-Easter chocolate

Just read Adam Hochschild's American Midnight. (Moira got it from the library, but let me read it first!) It's about the USA during and just after World War I, a time of xenophobia, proto-fascist mobs and a huge assault on civil liberties.

Now I'm reading Ada Ferrer's Cuba:  An American History for my History Meetup.  Very entertaining!

Last week I bought some post-Easter chocolate, but this year I only spent 15 or 20 dollars. (My favourite is white chocolate and chocolate with rice crisps.) Half of it was gourmet jelly beans in about 30 flavours.

We just watched the Danish TV show White Sands, about two cops going undercover in a surfing resort, posing as a couple to solve a murder. (Of course, there are romantic sparks...)

Last Friday my watch party showed Michael Cimino's ill-fated western Heaven's Gate.  It's the fourth time I've seen it:  a shameless mess yet a glorious folly!

Thursday I had lunch with Debbie at the Old Spaghetti Factory. (It turned out dinner was spaghetti too...)

The warm weather arrived, so the other day I started preparing the garden for planting.

Today I made fettucine alfredo, but it was made from raw linguini instead of pre-cooked fettucine, and instead of the usual grated parmesan Moira bought a block of parmesan and grated it herself.

FINNEGANS WAKE

 "The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy"--Finnegans Wake

I've joined a new Meetup group that's reading James Joyce's Finnegans Wake a couple of pages at a time.  The language is really complicated! (Notice that the title has no apostrophe...) Fortunately I've found the webpage finwake.com with an annotated text.  We meet online on Sunday nights.

I've also taken over an online Meetup group for reading short stories. (I enjoyed Farshad's similar Meetup, but he returned to Iran and that group disappeared.) Yesterday I had an event where we discussed Alice Munro's "Day of the Butterfly" and "Bardon Bus" and next month we'll do Stephen Leacock's hilarious parody collection Nonsense Novels.

I've caught up with the manga version of One Piece, having seen episode 1079! (They're now on a scientific research island called Egghead.)

On my Friday night watch party I've been showing some movies that even I haven't seen!  In recent weeks there's been the Japanese samurai-era movie Gate of Hell and Barry Levinson's Baltimore-set Liberty Heights, and last week it was the newsboy musical Newsies. (This week I'm showing The Thin Red Line, which I did see 25 years ago...)

The Labour Party's National Executive Committee finally went and deselected ex-leader Jeremy Corbyn!  Very tacky, and I've been vocal about it on Twitter.  It's time for the British left to form a new party. (I think of the Reservoir Dogs line "Are you gonna bark all day, Little Doggie, or are you gonna bite?" It's time for the left to bite.)

Caught up with ONE PIECE

Last week, after four or five years, I finally got caught up with the long-running anime One Piece, seeing the last of its 1053 existing episodes! (Now I'll have to watch just one a week, like others who are up to date, instead of two a day.) Now I'm reading the manga version of the story online, which is about 50 episodes ahead of the anime.  I've almost reached the end of the Wano story, the longest and most colourful of its mega-arcs.  It involves a country that's avoided foreign contact for centuries, and it takes its look from Japan's similar Edo Era.

Speaking of which, I'm now reading Mark Ravina's To Stand With the Nations of the World:  Japan's Meiji Restoration in World History for my History Meetup.  I moved the location back to the Tim Horton Doughnuts near Bay station because the Imperial Pub was too crowded for people to find me.  But now I think I'll move it to the doughnut place on St. Clair West because parking will be easier there.

I like this weather when there's still snow on the ground but it's melting!

On Thursday Moira and I had lunch at Puitak's apartment and we skimmed through the Oscars show.  We walked down to her place, because the weather was warm, and I felt pretty bushed afterward.

On Friday night my watch party showed Ken Loach's The Wind That Shakes the Barley, about the Irish Troubles.  I'd seen it before over 15 years ago, but I'd forgotten how good it was! (The next day I watched it again with the DVD commentary, by Loach and an Irish historian.) It's a real disgrace that he was expelled from the Labour Party for promoting Labour Against the Witch Hunt...

Today I had a big headache and skipped dinner.

DON GIOVANNI

On his role in the Barcelona standoff between anarchists and the Republican government: "If this was history it did not feel like it. It was more like a bad period at the front, when men were short and we had to do abnormal hours of guard-duty; instead of being heroic one just had to stay at one’s post, bored, dropping with sleep and completely uninterested as to what it was all about"--Homage to Catalonia

We put on Don Giovanni the weekend before last at the Miles Nadal theatre near Spadina station. It was pretty fun.  I missed the Saturday afternoon performance because I thought it was in the evening! (I told people afterward that I hadn't been feeling well.)

I finished reading that book about the Spanish Civil War and also read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.  Now I'm reading Periodic Tales:  The Curious Lives of the Elements, a book by Hugh Aldersey-Williams about the history of man's relationship with various chemical elements.  I got it in London over ten years ago and only got around to reading it now.

Last Tuesday John P. and I saw Neil Jordan's Marlowe with Liam Neeson as Raymond Chandler's detective.  That was pretty fun too.

Saturday I saw the Chinese movie Hidden Blade just because I needed to get out of the house!  It's a pretty confusing story about Chinese spies working for the Japanese occupiers during World War II and turning double agent--the sort of thing where two of the earliest scenes turn out to be flash-forwards to scenes at the end.

I ran out of Cipralex and only got replenished today, so I had some more vivid dreams.  In one I was a graduate student in London (like I really was in the mid-'90s), but then the story changed and I became like Peter Sellers in Being There, becoming a "star" for no good reason.  In another I was visiting a theme park near Niagara Falls with a World War II theme with an actor performing a Joseph Goebbels speech! (I was reading about Goebbels on Wikipedia...)

61

Last Sunday was my 61st birthday.  My birthday party wore me out, and I had to go to bed early. (We ate Indian food for the first time in a while.) I think the lemon-flavoured birthday cake disagreed with me too.

I finished the book about Ashoka. (I wanted to renew it but someone had put a hold on it, so I was several days overdue returning it.) Now I'm reading Julian Casanova's A Short History of the Spanish Civil War for next month's History Meetup. (Yes, reading For Whom the Bell Tolls got me interested in the subject.) Spain's Catholic Church establishment doesn't come out looking good...

Today I was actually early for my Sunday afternoon singing group! (I'm usually several minutes late.)

We're now doing the stage blocking for Don Giovanni.  I'm going to be one of the people who carries out the Commander's body in the first scene.  (I just learned that this opera's based on a 17th-century play by Tirso de Molina, a Spanish monk!)

At the Toronto Reference Library last week, I found some back issues of Life magazine back in 1972 just before it ceased weekly publication.  My family subscribed to it, and I remember reading some of it at the time!

BABYLON

"Walking carefully, downhill, Anselmo in the lead, Agustin next, Robert Jordan placing his feet carefully so that he would not slip, feeling the dead pine needles under his rope-soled shoes, bumping a tree root with one foot and putting a hand forward and feeling the cold metal jut of the automatic rifle barrel and the shoes sliding and grooving the forest floor, putting his left hand out again and touching the rough bark of a tree trunk, then as he braced himself his hand feeling a smooth place, the bases of the palm of his hand coming away sticky from the resinous sap where a blaze had been cut, they dropped down the steep wooded hillside to the point above the bridge where Robert Jordan and Anselmo had watched the first day"--For Whom the Bell Tolls

Last Tuesday I saw Babylon with John P.  It's like being on a runaway train:  unsettling in places, but you may as well enjoy it.  Brad Pitt has a subtle way of winking at the audience.

Finished For Whom the Bell Tolls yesterday.  It's a masterpiece of grim realism, though not so romantic.  I was thinking of doing Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped and David Balfour for my now-defunct book club, and maybe I'll reread them anyway. (I'm interested in Scottish history these days.)

My History Meetup's next subject will be India's ancient Maurya Dynasty, so I'm now going to read Charles Allen's Ashoka:  The Search for India's Lost Emperor. (Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin biography was excellent!) I may do the Spanish Civil War in April since Hemingway got me interested in that.

The week before last my historical movie watch party showed David Mamet's superb adaptation of Terence Rattigan's play The Winslow Boy.  I didn't return it right away because Moira wanted to see it too, and then I forgot about it and only returned it a day late.  But they didn't charge a late fee!

Moira's gone to Kingston for a while so I'm living on my own.  I went to the supermarket and bought nine frozen dinners! (I can cook, but it seems pointless to go to the trouble of cooking no more than one person will eat...)

It's pomelo season again!