Lockdown Diary - Monday 13th April 2020
Yoga again this morning: good session but I arrived in Zoom 10 minutes late, owing to the laptop doing a virus scan which slowed things down so much I had re-boot. Despite (or probably because of) starting the laptop an hour earlier, I still go caught out. Must see if I can find a way to configure McAfee to either ask before starting a scan or to do it later in the day. A small project.
After yoga, coffee! Finished reading 'Ghost Wall', though I'll have to save my thoughts on it until after book club discusses it on the 4th May. Started 'The Queue' as I only have a week to read it in - good job I'm on leave this week!
Since I spent so much time at the weekend doing washing and other chores, I'm planning another relaxing do. Reading. Start an online course. That sort of thing.
Early afternoon I completed the first lesson of The Idler's course on the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, titled 'An Introduction to Borges with Henry Eliot'. Lesson 1 is titled 'Libraries' both because Borges was the head of Argentina's National Library and because, unsurprisingly, libraries feature in some of his most important stories. Henry Eliot, who presents the course, is both a writer and works as for Penguin Classics. He's both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about his subject - he clearly loves Borges' writing and listening to him talk fills you with the same enthusiasm. I've read some of Borges' stories in the past and have several books of fictions and poetry he wrote and decided to dig out my copies of these books. I spent ages searching for the paperbacks I have, and three top to bottom shelf by shelf searches of the 'non-James Joyce' bookcases found nothing. The poetry is in my office with most of the other books of poems, so that was easy to find, but despairing my failure to find the stories, I decided to search online for copies of them. Amazon search showed few still in print, so I decided to look at the Blackwells site. Good decision. Searching through their books, many in the original Spanish, I came across a hardback with a cover I recognised: 'Collected Fictions'. Eureka! I was sure I had had this book as a Christmas or birthday present, and sure enough when I went back to the book cases, there it was! I had been looking for paperbacks, so had passed this by each time I'd looked. Just shows how different looking and seeing are: if your mind is fixed on a particular image of what you are looking for, you will miss something different, even thought the book has the author's name on it in big letters. Wood and trees come to mind.
I can now plan to do lesson 2, and maybe 3 as well, tomorrow. Just have to make sure I don't get drawn into reading the Borges stories before I've made some serious progress on 'The Queue'.
The more I listen to music the more difficult it is to choose a track to play here. There are so many songs/tunes I could choose: 'Aladdin Sane'; 'Carpet Crawlers'; 'Cherry Red'; 'Sabbra Cadabra'; 'As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still'; 'Killing Yourself To Live'; 'I'm Not Your Dog'; 'Breaking Shells'; 'French Film Blurred'; the list goes on...
Through some convoluted sequence of synapse triggerings, I found myself at Van Der Graaf Generator and the album 'Still Life'. This is the title track, though I could so easily have picked another, it's a very strong record.
After yoga, coffee! Finished reading 'Ghost Wall', though I'll have to save my thoughts on it until after book club discusses it on the 4th May. Started 'The Queue' as I only have a week to read it in - good job I'm on leave this week!
Since I spent so much time at the weekend doing washing and other chores, I'm planning another relaxing do. Reading. Start an online course. That sort of thing.
Early afternoon I completed the first lesson of The Idler's course on the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, titled 'An Introduction to Borges with Henry Eliot'. Lesson 1 is titled 'Libraries' both because Borges was the head of Argentina's National Library and because, unsurprisingly, libraries feature in some of his most important stories. Henry Eliot, who presents the course, is both a writer and works as for Penguin Classics. He's both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about his subject - he clearly loves Borges' writing and listening to him talk fills you with the same enthusiasm. I've read some of Borges' stories in the past and have several books of fictions and poetry he wrote and decided to dig out my copies of these books. I spent ages searching for the paperbacks I have, and three top to bottom shelf by shelf searches of the 'non-James Joyce' bookcases found nothing. The poetry is in my office with most of the other books of poems, so that was easy to find, but despairing my failure to find the stories, I decided to search online for copies of them. Amazon search showed few still in print, so I decided to look at the Blackwells site. Good decision. Searching through their books, many in the original Spanish, I came across a hardback with a cover I recognised: 'Collected Fictions'. Eureka! I was sure I had had this book as a Christmas or birthday present, and sure enough when I went back to the book cases, there it was! I had been looking for paperbacks, so had passed this by each time I'd looked. Just shows how different looking and seeing are: if your mind is fixed on a particular image of what you are looking for, you will miss something different, even thought the book has the author's name on it in big letters. Wood and trees come to mind.
I can now plan to do lesson 2, and maybe 3 as well, tomorrow. Just have to make sure I don't get drawn into reading the Borges stories before I've made some serious progress on 'The Queue'.
The more I listen to music the more difficult it is to choose a track to play here. There are so many songs/tunes I could choose: 'Aladdin Sane'; 'Carpet Crawlers'; 'Cherry Red'; 'Sabbra Cadabra'; 'As Long As He Lies Perfectly Still'; 'Killing Yourself To Live'; 'I'm Not Your Dog'; 'Breaking Shells'; 'French Film Blurred'; the list goes on...
Through some convoluted sequence of synapse triggerings, I found myself at Van Der Graaf Generator and the album 'Still Life'. This is the title track, though I could so easily have picked another, it's a very strong record.
[[A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers]]
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