It took me quite a while to type up that title. The last notes of the piece are fading away as I type this. Now Pandora is on to Chopin. I tried to copy the title and paste it in. That would have been simple but good old Word Press wouldn’t accept it. I thought it might be because I copied it from a link and perhaps there was something about a link that didn’t translate into text. The search for an alternate non link text led me to a webpage that showed the date of of Antonin Dvorak’s composition. It was 1887 the year my Grandfather Robb, that I go on so much about, was born.
Its quiet at 4:43 this Sunday morning. I got a good four hours sleep. Maybe that’s enough if I get a couple naps in after or before Sunday’s worship service. Claudia needs to go there because she is sitting in to watch the kid’s sunday school. She’ll be taking notes for one of her religion classes.
I wasn’t dreaming about the School Board when I woke. It had been a dream about my having brought living dinosaurs back to life. They were rampaging in whatever suburban community the dream was staged in. I was having a heck of a time trying to save them from being slaughtered by the unhappy residents who didn’t like the chaos. In the back of my dream’s mind I was grateful that I had the DNA of the beasts in case they had to be resurrected again. Make of that what you will.
Yesterday I read aloud to Claudia for almost four hour’s straight.The Narrow Road to the Deep North is something. I wouldn’t recommend it to the faint hearted. I was reading a brutal passage about the lives of Australian POW’s in Japanese work camps a couple days ago when a cleaning crew was hovering around the french doors of our sun room trying unobtrusively to listen in. They’ve overheard lighter fare in the past but this one was all slogging in shit contaminated muck during the choleric monsoon season and that’s putting it delicately. Four wasted Ausies were put on sodden logs that day to be burned in a funeral pyre.
Narrow Road to the Deep North is by Tasmanian Richard Flanagan. When Claudia and I ventured to the Antipodes four years ago we took in the Island and read a number of books by Australians to prep for our trip. I recall that Flanagan was one of the authors we considered reading but this is the first of his many books we’ve dived into. I had heard a NPR book critic extol the book saying it had just won the British version of our Pulitzer. The critic added that it ought to win a Nobel. On that heady note it was easy enough to download onto Claudia’s Kindle. Besides, I can’t resist dialogue which gives me a chance to use my enthusiastic Australian accent. It’s funny though, I’m not sure there’s a quotation mark in the whole damn book. Here’s one of many reviews I haven’t read although I agree with one line I read before linking that warned readers the book was harrowing. Damn. There is something wrong. I can’t paste stuff now. Oh well, if your computer is working online you can find some laudatory review on your own.
I’m not going to offer a full fledged review myself. I will say that I can’t read for four hours straight out loud unless something keeps me awake. Furthermore, this is in some ways the most honest treatment of the controversial treatment by the Japanese occupiers of the War. The Rape of Nanking (I’d link to that book as well but my computer is acting fritzy) was superlative but that was history. This is a novel and it reaches for the same sublime truths of a haiku poem of which quite a few are quoted including, I believe, the book’s title.
When I got to a passage mentioning the experimentation on POW’s Claudia asked me if it was true. You bet it is. I told Claudia that if some Japanese literature prof assigned this book to his class he would almost certainly get an avalanche of death threats from Japanese Nationalists. I would note that the Japanese are not unique. Many if not most people prefer to avert their eyes from their own misdeeds. I recall the letter to the editor when Duluth set up the Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial urging the City to reconsider because the writer didn’t want to injure his grandchildren’s gentle little psyche’s. (my paraphrase) I’m breaking in my grandson’s psyche’s by reading them Calvin and Hobbes.
Claudia shares my willingness to look closely at life if not my aversion to looking away. We both teared up at a fine little movie called Calvary at the Zinema a couple weeks ago. You knew where it was going by the title and the first scene in a confessional where a confessor said he was going to kill the priest because he’d been buggered by another one during his childhood. The murderer played a part in one of my favorite Doc Martin episodes. The Priest was Mad Eye Moody in the Harry Potter series. Love those British actors.
We’ve also been watching some of the new series put out by alternative networks. We got the first season of Boardwalk Empire in. Its been lauded for its attention to 1920’s detail the result of Director Martin Scorsese’s love for all things Mafia I guess. Wikipedia is a good corrective to some of the series’s narrative departure from history. The first season was free on Amazon Prime but so far we’ve balked at paying the $46 bucks to watch the subsequent seasons. I’m not sure what Claudia thinks of the candid and enthusiastic sex scenes. They are not critical to the narrative but gosh……they are enthusiastic.
I think my difficulty with an eight hour night’s sleep lies not only with the School Board’s shennanigans but my restless mind and late night wine drinking. Damn again. Word Press’s editor is telling me that shenanigans is spelled wrong but it won’t suggest a correct spelling.
Oh yeah, on my difficulty sleeping. I read voraciously and am always looking for honesty. Its been a while since I raved about Andrew Sullivan’s blog. I try hard not to miss it but his crew pumps out so much that its not easy to keep up. This is my first post on something other than ISD 709 in a while but there are a lot of other things occupying my mind in the news. I thought about commenting, among many subjects, on Adrian Peterson’s travails in the wake of his whipping his four year old son. It was tempting to offer an opinion early but I had my own fish to fry. As usual I found some of the most thoughtful analysis on Sullivan’s blog from his readers both pro and con. Its Sullivan’s readers I read him for as much, if not more than, Sullivan himself. He is awfully gay. I found this post from a reader most engaging. I don’t think I can link to it now because of the fritz. But I will try to locate it and post its URL. You can paste it in yourself if you’d like to read a superlative commentary on whipping kids. “Psychological suspense that no child is equipped to manage.” I can’t copy anything right not but if you type that into your browser I think you will find the spot.
That’s it. Some non ISD 709. I may come back and clean up links if my computer settles down later.
My computer settled down. Its spelled shenanigans. To get a fuller flavor of the feedback Andrew Sullivan got on spankings look at these posts and particularly the black comedian who has a funny, if profane, take on how his black mother terrorized him.
