2015 — 2 January: Friday
Back to normal.1 "Shall I eat a peach?" (By all means, lad, if you first nip out and buy one.)
I've been reading...
... around the swirling comments appended both to this blog and the NS article that directed me to it in the first place. If nothing else, it serves as a very stark reminder to me of just how very fortunate I was to meet Christa at the perfect moment in my life. It also ironically reflects back a thorny issue (what could be called "Nerd v Neanderthal") touched on by the equally self-revelatory Robert Crumb2 in his "My Troubles with Women".
Blimey! It's way past time I got some breakfast loaded. How did that happen?
Oops!
My bad. A month ago I attributed to Groucho Marx a remark about Doris Day's virginity (or lack of) that I see Joseph Epstein, in the course of a book review, attributes to Oscar Levant. This more personal snippet from the same review made me smile:
During my last teaching days, in a course I taught on Henry James, I asked a student named Jonathan Stern to describe the character Gilbert Osmond from James's The Portrait of a Lady. Without the least intent to offend his teacher or evoke laughter from his classmates, he declared Osmond "an asshole." I seemed to be the only one in the room shocked by his response, and I told him, calmly, that I would allow each student in the course one such word, and he had now used up his allowance. Only later, leaving class, actually walking down the stairs, did it occur to me that what I should have said was, "I'm pleased, Mr. Stern, that I didn't ask you to describe Oedipus Rex."
Don't miss the Maurice Bowra witticism, either.
Having braved...
... the heaving hordes of Friday shoppers to snaffle enough food to keep body and soul together for another few days I have to say it's a long time since I experienced a Friday that feels less like a Friday than this Friday does. I'm sure it's a perfectly nice Friday, but I can't help blaming the recent festive spasms for my feelings of temporal dislocation. That, or it could be the currently empty tum, of course. Get thee to the kitchen, David!
Right away, boss.
I've inspected...
... what Dr Kermode has to say about his worst 10 and best 10 films of 2014. He didn't cause me to add anything to my "to-get" list that wasn't already on it. (One must bear in mind that the poor chap thinks "The Exorcist" is about the best film [of its kind, I hope] ever made.)
Why not?
3GB of my bandwidth for the new episodes of EF Benson's sublime "Mapp & Lucia" in 720p HD to see how it compares to the analogue PAL 4:3 set3 I already own. Christa and I laughed our way through that a decade or so ago. It was made — if you can believe it — 30 years ago(!) with Prunella Scales, Geraldine McEwan and Nigel Hawthorne. And registers a pretty good "8.6" on IMDB's Richter scale.
Junior's just admitted...
... (as I suspected would be the case) that he and his g/f are off to France for a spot of ski-type activity for the next week or so. I've requested they both try very hard to avoid breaking or dislocating anything. I must say, he didn't sound terribly upset at the thought of missing his grandmother's upcoming 98th birthday :-)
[Longish Pause]
Well, I enjoyed the first of the three "Mapp" episodes well enough to be persuaded to watch the other two. Though probably not until after I've finished my second little trek through the splendid tosh that is "Kings".