What I didn't read on my holiday

When this blog began three years ago (or was it four?. . I'm on holiday and I forget) the instructions from the webmeister were that it must continue every week of the year, from wherever I happened to be, lest, like a neglected pet or plant, it might whither and die.

For all these blogging years I've followed this command.

 But this past fortnight has not been one to be proud of.

One post in two weeks - and that about fighting canaries in Connecticut - has been a poor show.

'Just write about what you're reading', the webmeister had said. 'How hard can that be?'

It didn't sound too hard.

Even a few weeks ago it didn't sound too hard.

When the Toronto Globe and Mail asked me what I'd be reading on vacation, I gave a crisp, confident  account of how the poems of Joseph Brodsky were on my mind and how a deck on Cape Cod would be just the place to unravel a few problems therein.

But I haven't blogged on Brodsky  because I haven't read any Brodsky here.

In the first day or two I  did read Lermontov's A Hero Of Our Time in a  new Oneworld Classic Edition. But I must have left it somewhere and two weeks later can only remember one line.

That's the one  when the hero says that 'I love my enemies though not in the Christian way'. The love of having enemies for their very hatability is a much underrated passion and a good basis for following American politics at all seasons.

After that I found a good Eric Ambler thriller from 1939, The Mask of Dimitrios, just republished by Penguin, packed with useful history from the Balkans.

And then a bad Eric Ambler from 1937, Uncommon Danger, which has an absurd plot about Romania and an implausible journalist hero.

After that nothing at all.

I must have become very adaptable in later middle age. No one much reads books here or talks about them . So neither do I.  

Normal service, drawn from what I'm sure will be a brilliant new issue of the TLS, will resume next week.

Comments

[Candadai Tirumalai]

Friends and enemies have led to sayings and witticisms, as in "My enemy's enemy is my friend," and "God save me from my friends. I can deal with my enemies myself."
As for the "love of having enemies for their very hatability," I should have liked to try that one on Juvenal and Jonathan Swift.

[Reading in Tennessee]

Obviously, you are being consoled by other things at present. Personally, I have yet to find anything outside nature and narrative (be it paper or film) that consoles me so well, and I'm so grateful to have the time to indulge. And the word indulge reminds me that it is a self-absorbed interest that keeps me fr more worthy activities. Certainly a much worthier one is publicizing canary fighting in Connecticut. Thank you for that.

[Dion Per Sona]

It isn't as though we are not reading at all. NuLabor has us all swotting up on legalistic arcana backgrounding the 3097 new crimes it has decreed. We could discuss The 2006 Companies Act, and how market dynamics drive the plot as enforcement kicks in, and how it is all threads back throuogh to the finance-linked bonus-boosted disappearance of three waves of industrial landscape. The world itself read as a Hardy novel, edited perhaps by Dickens is not as quirky a place to inhabit as a Jamesian county backwater. Modernity and lit crit may have taken our collective eye off the bouncing ball at the foot of the frame which helps us follow the words of the song we have all forgotten how (or when) to sing.

But it doesn't mean that one is not reading...things like the fine print on contracts gleefully signed only 18 months ago. The context is Steinbeck, or so it is feared. The rise of murder as an entertaining subject is also less mystifying.

One did like Clayton Burns' comparison (google it) of the suitability of wood vs steel, the slow and methodical accretion of quite old facts mustered to demonstrate the inanity of specifying steel in certain applications. We know this patient work did no good at all: steel replaced everything including most of its' workers, investment banks bagged huge fees, and *plouff!* the industry itself then collapsed as it faced the fees and interest payments on loans for acquisitions it could no longer load with production.

Probably Steinbeck via Gibbon.

[Karl Kraut]

Please don't worry so much while holidaying! All year long you're very busy editing a very fine magazine, so relax and take it easy.

[Dion Per Sona]

http://www.counterpunch.org/hudson08182009.html

...a good read, indeed.