2014 — 21 August: Thursday
The splendidly-maned Clemency Burton-Hill has just followed "Greensleeves" with "Dumbarton Oaks" on her breakfast show. Not bad at all. And Amazon has recovered sufficiently from the assault on my account to send off the rest of the BD titles I listed yesterday, so I can legitimately relax with my cuppa.
Next up...
... will be yet more supplies hunter-gathering1 and today's lunch, this time with young Len, who has yet to tease me about managing to get hacked (or at least to come under attack).
Hank Moody...
... proved reliably entertaining last night, but I rationed myself to just two episodes. One doesn't wish to gorge on such rich treats. And Mr BBC has just told me that one out of five "assisted deaths" in Switzerland have been people from the UK, at the rate of one a fortnight for the last five years. Surely there's a growing business opportunity more locally for some thrusting entrepreneur?
I remember struggling with Elaine Scarry's book many years ago. And, just a few years ago, I was granted far too much insight into Christa's pain. Now, there's a book review in the TLS re-treading some of the same ground. But, honestly, when I read rubbish like this...
Consider the recommendations of the Benedictine ethicist Peter Flood, writing in 1956. Pain, he insisted, in words that might have been written a century or more before, is "our privilege, in union with the redemptive sufferings of Christ", and more important than pain relief was the need to "die consciously, to achieve contrition for one's sins, to seek forgiveness from God before it is too late". Exceptions might be made, but not for heretics and those who had abjured their fate. "If the dying man was known to have led an 'evil life and has not repented' (for example [and a telling example it is!], if he was 'a lapsed Catholic who has not received the Sacraments') then it was forbidden under any circumstances to proffer relief." Let them suffer. It was their just deserts, and of course but a portent of the eternal torments that awaited the damned.
... I'm sorely tempted to spit. (Not at the reviewer, I hasten to add, but at the stupidly deluded Flood.) How does one become a Benedictine ethicist, I idly wonder? I really don't mind if misguided people choose to believe in "redemptive suffering" for themselves, but — for me — it's got to be "Nurse! More morphine!" every time. Assuming I'm not 'holidaying' in Switzerland at the time. [Pause] Next supplies safely gathered in, including my first greengages this year. Juicy!
I wish...
... this was a joke:
I assume you can extract Adamantium from Unobtainium. But I could be wrong.
Having been reminded...
... just last week of Norton Juster's magnificent "Phantom Tollbooth" it's probably not a huge surprise to find me quite late this afternoon unwrapping a considerably more sumptuous hardback version. It's an annotated edition I found when I started looking to "upgrade" my cheap and cheerful Armada Lions paperback.
It brings my total of books of 'meta-information' to 14 (now that I've tightened up my previous definition of exactly which of my books constitutes an annotated edition):
I make the rules, here. Don't like it? Bite me!
Had you asked me...
... I would have said "Surely (the wonderful) Calvin and Hobbes was never censored?" I would have been wrong. (Evidence.)
Speaking of censoring stuff (a topic that I have strong feelings against, in general) today's other entertaining delivery was a Blu-ray release of the Wachowskis' excellent first film as directors. Both Christa and I were very impressed by this film when we saw it in the Harbour Lights cinema back in 1996:
I bought us a copy on NTSC LaserDisc, on to which the Wachowskis had managed to squeeze a directors' commentary on one of the two analogue audio channels without disturbing the Dolby AC-3 surround mix carried digitally by the RF track on the other analogue channel. (This was before DVDs, remember.) That admirable lady Susie Bright was hired as 'sexual consultant' to the Wachowski brothers on the film, in which she appears briefly as an extra in a lesbian bar scene, and she can also be heard on the commentary. She sympathises with the Wachowskis on the degree of homophobia2 exhibited toward the 'hand sex' — a neologism coined by the Ratings Authorities while they were insisting on cuts to the key sex scene between Gina Gershon, then of Showgirls notoriety, and Jennifer Tilly.
I was tickled...
... to read a quotation from Ira Wallach in the interesting introduction to the "Annotated Phantom Tollbooth" — and still more tickled when I managed to find my copy of the one book I have by him in a little under one lifetime...
You must admit, the faded cover gives it an authentically aged look. I found it in Cambridge on one of my Wednesday afternoon bookshop visits in 1971, and it cost me £1 — just twice what I'd paid that year for "Think".