Monday, December 31, 2007

Middlemarch and War and Peace

Middlemarch was a tough book to read. Eliot is an amazing writer, as far as getting into the minds of the characters with complex and beautiful phrasing and intricate and philosophical conjectures, but it is not easy to comprehend her sentences without concentration. The ending was a bit too much of a "happy ever after" type of ending, but I would rate George Eliot as being one of the very best writers ever, next to all the other greats.

War and Peace, after reading the first 400 pages, is turning out to be great. It is easy to see how much easier life is for people today, given the level of medical care and so forth. The battle descriptions are cool and the characters are complicated and not cliches.

So far my resolution to watch no tv or movies is going well. I have the time to read heavy literature.

Friday, December 14, 2007

saxophonist

Monday, December 10, 2007

today was a'cold

the owl, for all its feathers, was a'shiverin'
and silent was the flock in wooly fold
I however was protected
because in Fred's was detected
a set of warm long underwear
purchased to protect me from the freezing air

Saturday, December 08, 2007

brilliant disguise

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Notes from the Overfed

(After reading Dostoyevsky and "Weight Watchers" on the same plane trip)

I am fat. I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat. (Can you imagine fat eyes?) I am hundreds of pounds overweight. Flesh drips from me like hot fudge off a sundae. My girth has been an object of disbelief to everyone who's seen me. There is no question about it, I'm a regular fatty. Now, the reader may ask, are there advantages or disadvantages to being built like a planet? I do not mean to be facetious or speak in paradoxes, but I must answer that fat in itself is above bourgeois morality. It is simply fat. That fat could have a value of its own, that fat could be, say, evil or pitying, is, or course, a joke. Absurd! For what is fat after all but an accumulation of pounds?

-woody allen