We're off to get a hairdo, and toenails by wizard of Oz
? Uh oh, other personalities seem to be crowding in here...
While looking through, but not reading thoroughly, a review by John Updike of a Max Ernst retrospective in NYC, I came upon the beginning of a poem by the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, written to his horror of a wife, Gala, while they were separated: "At the end of a long journey, I can still see that long corridor, that gloomy burrow, that warm darkness where a breeze blows in drifting off the surf." Strange mixture of yearning and claustrophobia. She ditched him for Salvador Dali, eventually. I remember when I was a kid seeing a photo of her with Dali, and thinking she looked like an evil witch. I was correct, she was a succubus that devoured her men.
My mother's got a very sore left knee, which has prevented her from getting more than a couple of blocks of walking in today, when we went to the hair salon. This just cropped up yesterday morning; she decided to take one of her longer walks, thinking the movement might help it, but it seems a bit worse today. I had her take a Tylenol, and put some arnica gel on the afflicted area. I do hope a rest day will help it, because without her walks she'll not get any exercise...
This situation gives me stress; I took it out in a run and workout. I guess little things worry me, as if they'll be the start of a sharper decline.
Whew, John Banville, whose most recent novel was "Shroud," which did not even engage me enough to start it, savages Ian McKewan's latest, called "Saturday." One particularly sharp passage by Banville: "It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I go wrong? Or, he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art-
no desk-bound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong - the thing will not flow,
the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right - but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for teh agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place." (Interesting: Margaret Atwood talked about male authors referring to producing their works as if they were giving birth...)
Hoo - wee, Mr. Banville, thou dost protest so very mightily! Makes me wonder if he's evening up some score with Mr. McEwan. Not that I'm a big McEwan fan - Atonement was all right, but not fabulous - but man, Banville really socks it to him in this review in the May 26th issue of The New York Review of Books.
Out for a bite and a beverage with a friend and our son; a pleasant interlude.
While looking through, but not reading thoroughly, a review by John Updike of a Max Ernst retrospective in NYC, I came upon the beginning of a poem by the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard, written to his horror of a wife, Gala, while they were separated: "At the end of a long journey, I can still see that long corridor, that gloomy burrow, that warm darkness where a breeze blows in drifting off the surf." Strange mixture of yearning and claustrophobia. She ditched him for Salvador Dali, eventually. I remember when I was a kid seeing a photo of her with Dali, and thinking she looked like an evil witch. I was correct, she was a succubus that devoured her men.
My mother's got a very sore left knee, which has prevented her from getting more than a couple of blocks of walking in today, when we went to the hair salon. This just cropped up yesterday morning; she decided to take one of her longer walks, thinking the movement might help it, but it seems a bit worse today. I had her take a Tylenol, and put some arnica gel on the afflicted area. I do hope a rest day will help it, because without her walks she'll not get any exercise...
This situation gives me stress; I took it out in a run and workout. I guess little things worry me, as if they'll be the start of a sharper decline.
Whew, John Banville, whose most recent novel was "Shroud," which did not even engage me enough to start it, savages Ian McKewan's latest, called "Saturday." One particularly sharp passage by Banville: "It happens occasionally that a novelist will lose his sense of artistic proportion, especially when he has done a great deal of research and preparation. I have read all those books, he thinks, I have made all these notes, so how can I go wrong? Or, he devises a program, a manifesto, which he believes will carry him free above the demands of mere art-
no desk-bound scribbler he, no dabbler in dreams, but a man of action, a match for any scientist or soldier. He sets to work, and immediately matters start to go wrong - the thing will not flow,
the characters are mulishly stubborn, even the names are not right - but yet he persists, mistaking the frustrations of an unworkable endeavor for teh agonies attendant upon the fashioning of a masterpiece. But no immensity of labor will bring to successful birth a novel that was misconceived in the first place." (Interesting: Margaret Atwood talked about male authors referring to producing their works as if they were giving birth...)
Hoo - wee, Mr. Banville, thou dost protest so very mightily! Makes me wonder if he's evening up some score with Mr. McEwan. Not that I'm a big McEwan fan - Atonement was all right, but not fabulous - but man, Banville really socks it to him in this review in the May 26th issue of The New York Review of Books.
Out for a bite and a beverage with a friend and our son; a pleasant interlude.
posted by isabelita at 10:41 AM
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