2025 Readings 108

 I've been watching a lot of Japanese cinema lately, and not simply all the films in my Japanese film noir class. Anyway, I was thinking of watching my favorite Akira Kurosawa film, Ikiru, again. It's a film that I always want to show in class, but, being a Kurosawa film, it's much too long. It's influenced by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which made me realize that I hadn't reread that classic in way too long a time. If you haven't read it (and shame on you if you haven't), it's essentially a novella (especially by Tolstoy standards), and on Audible it was only two and a half hours. It's message, that of a dying man, if only for about fifteen minutes about two hours before he dies, realizing how foolish his life decisions had been. completely still resonates today: "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Highly recommended.

2025 Readings 107

 I've finished three different books in the last couple days, which is more impressive than it sounds. As we've discussed, I, like most readers, have several books going at the same time, and this time three just happened to finish up at the same time. I finished the second book in the Dune series, Dune Messiah. The ending redeemed the book a bit, although I don't know if it would inspire me to read any more in the series. I was telling my son that I thought Dune Messiah had too little of what made the first book, Dune, so good: extensive and fascinating world building - and too much of what often dragged down the first book: pretty clumsy dialogue, full of endless self-reflection and doubt. Obviously, it's not as if I'm opposed to the self-reflection, it's just that it was either clumsily delivered or painfully obvious, and tended to drag on. I'll do some research on the next installment and decide if I want to go on or not.

33

 We're down to 33, counting this upcoming Finals Week. Actually, as I've pointed out, I'm not certain exactly how many days, mainly because my spring semester is still a little unclear. The number will not jump to lower single digits, however, because the college, after giving it some thought, decided to not buy me out of my last semester.  Or maybe they didn't decide not to do so because that would have implied that they actually thought about it. Either way, it looks like my spring schedule is coming closer to coming into focus. The countdown next semester will be more exactly.

Here's Andrew Harris during his early days with the BC Lions. He later played for his hometown Winnipeg Blue Bombers before finishing his career with the Toronto Argonaut. Currently he's the running back coach for the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Obviously, he's CFL through and through. During his career he rushed for over 10,000 yards. He has won five Grey Cups (four as a player, and one this year as a coach).

2025 Readings 106

 I've talked about the wealth of books that I culled from the Northshire Bookstore's New York Review of Books (NYRB) corner. Last night I finished another of them: Sigizmund Krzhizhanosvky's Autobiography of a Corpse, a collection of short stories. Like the vast majority of the NYRB books that I purchased, I really liked, bordered on loved, Autobiography of a Corpse. True to the mission of the NYRB collection, Krzhizhanosvky is an author I'd never heard of (another gaping hole in my witless Hoosier education). All the stories are clever, although not so clever that you find yourself thinking, "OK, now you're just trying to be clever." The stories are clever, but there's also an edge, and I would argue an odd humanity to them. Take for example this little portion from the short story "Seams":

Indeed, the only way I can write is bit by bit, in a break - along a seam. My thinking, too, feels short of breath: inhale - exhale, exhale - inhale. It's hard to finish a thought. Take today. I sat down on my usual bench on my usual boulevard and looked about. People were walking by - mincingly and swaggeringly, from right to left, from left to right, in ones and two, and in groups. First I thought: Who are they to me and who am I to them? Then I just stared. One they went, mincingly and swaggeringly, from left to right, from right to left. Again I thought: Man is to man a wolf. No, that's not true, that's sentimental, lighthearted. No, man is to man a ghost. Only. That's more exact. To sink one's teeth into another man's throat is at least to believe - and that's what counts - in another man's blood. But there's the rub: Man cased to believe in man long ago, even before he began doubting God. We fear another man's existence the way we fear apparitions, and only very rarely, when people glimpse each other in the gloaming, do we say of them: They're in love. No wonder lovers seek out a nighttime hour, the better to envision each other, an hour when ghosts are abroad.

I also enjoyed the story "In the Pupil," where a group of souls who had looked into the same woman's eye and said the same thing to her while she said the same things to you (that is, the usual lies that you tell each other), are trapped in a room that is clearly her eye with the pupil as a ceiling, condemned to hear her hear and say that same things to later men - and "Yellow Coal," based on a scientist inventing a new way to harvest an abundant energy source, human spite.

Highly recommended.

And So It Begins

 Here's yet another picture of Bliss Pond, which has been featured in too many posts lately. It's one my latest longcut to the cabin. In this case, sadly, it's representative of the arrival of winter. UTKR

I think it's the beached canoe, sitting lonely and neglected, that makes the picture. I will not miss the winter when we're in Sicily.

2025 Readings 105

    I know who I was, I can tell you who I may have been, but I am, now, only in this line of words I write. I'm not sure of the nature of my existence, and wonder to find myself writing. I speak Latin, of course, but did I ever learn to write it? That seems unlikely. No doubt someone with my name, Lavinia, did exist, but she may have been so different from my own idea of myself, or my poet's idea of me, that it only confuses me to think about her. As far as I know, it was my poet who gave me any reality at all. Before he wrote, I was the mistiest of figures, scarcely more than a name in a genealogy. It was he who brought me to life, to myself, and so made me able to remember my life and myself, which I do, vividly, with all kinds of emotions, emotions I feel strongly as I write, perhaps because the events I remember only come to exist as I write them, or as he wrote them.

    But he did not write them. He slighted my life, in his poem. He scanted me, because he only came to know who I was when he was dying. He's not to blame. It was too late for him to make amends, rethink, complete the half lines, perfect the poem he thought imperfect. He grieved for that, I  know; he grieved for me. Perhaps where he is now, down there across the dark rivers, somebody will tell him that Lavinia grieves for him.

Ursula Le Guin, Lavinia

This morning I finished Ursula Le Guin's novel Lavinia. Oddly, that's the third Le Guin novel I've read this year, odd because I had never read any of her work before. The first two were products of the demands of the Unofficial Book Club that continues to trundle on against all logic. Lavinia, however, was a byproduct of the Epics book. The character Lavinia plays an important, although limited and silent role in Virgil's Aeneid. She is destined to be Aeneas's second (or third, depending how you count Dido - I would be gracious and recognize Dido's belief that they were actually married) wife, and the mother of the Roman people. In the Aeneid she doesn't say a word, and she is most known for her hair catching on fire during a ceremony (which has tremendous prophetic implications) and her famous blush. I used her blush as a focal point in a chapter to talk about the fact we always want the female characters in the epics to say more, and that many modern readers have chosen these female characters and gave them that voice. It made me wonder if anyone had actually done that with Lavinia, and was surprised that Le Guin (I guess that's more pleasantly surprised that shocked). I don't know if I loved the book, but I liked it quite a bit, and it made me want to finish my own book even more. I always warn my students that when they choose a topic that they really love for a paper (for instance, instead of writing their paper on a section of Crime and Punishment for my Nature of Evil class they instead pick a video game or anime or film) one of the dangers is that they love it so much that they end up retelling way too much of the story. How could they not? If you asked me a question about Bleak House or The Chess Garden or The Book of Disquiet or Remembrance of Things Past I would waste way too much time gushing about the story. I would argue that Le Guin falls into that trip in Lavinia. She is trying to give Lavinia a voice, but too much of that voice was consumed with retelling the story of the Aeneid through Lavinia's eyes. Eventually, after the events of the Aeneid play themselves out, Le Guin can begin to tell the story of Aeneas's last three years, and Lavinia's sorrow know that he only has that short amount of time left, and the time after his death. The best part is that three year stretch of time before Aeneas's passing. It's clear that Le Guin loves the Aeneid, and that's one of the things that inspired her to take on the challenge of giving Lavinia her voice. And, if anyone know the temptation to convince folks to revisit these classic works it's me.

Spying

 This cabin really is one extended cat playground, and on one level it pains me to think of taking Mollie and Cici away from it. However, in the end, they'll be happy wherever we are - or at least wherever our laps are (and we'd be miserable without them). I'm always amazed when someone asks, "When you move overseas are you taking the cats?" It would be better to ask if they're taking us.

Here's a picture of Master Spy Mollie, keeping me company in my loft office while keeping an eye on Janet at the same time.