Freckles & Doubt

Lurgi Strikes Back! The rising tides of nausea all weekend were apparently the overture (slow, melancholic, minor, with occasional unpleasant crescendos) to a dose of 'flu. I'm all headachy, chesty and generally miserable, having spent an unpleasant night drowning on the contents of my own lungs. Sigh. These encyclopedia entries are doomed, dooomed, I say! Although I am starting to wring something resembling sense from the Animation one, mostly by brandishing a three-legged stool and shouting "Back, you leechies!" to all the extraneous examples.

I did, however, manage to take advantage of the usual faintly surreal 'flu-space to finish reading Haruki Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I borrowed from the dreaded stv about three seconds after they got back to Cape Town, and hadn't read until now, what, eight months later? Naughty me. It's a very weird book, and the first couple of attempts to read it left me alternately baffled and bored. This time I fared better: usual slow Murakami pace, usual deadpan Murakami non-reactive hero, usual incursions of dreamlike surreality, usual weird, slow-motion grasping after elusive, illusionary meaning. Very cool, even if the book's extended metaphor is prostitution. I both enjoyed and marvelled at the novel, but I think I was happier with Hard-Boiled Wonderland's unicorns.

In fact, it's been a good week for books. I finished Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma, a copy of which I unexpectedly scored courtesy of one of the English department's Great Literary Luminaries, who cleared out a whole lot of books and invited the dept. to help itself. I now have three Douglas Coupland novels pre-owned by Andre Brink. I really enjoyed Girlfriend in a Coma, it's an amazingly trippy but very real exploration of life's inner meaninglessness, with added post-apocalypse, spirit guides and random ostriches and volcano eruptions. Coupland has such a sure touch with character and observation, he actually gets away with surprising amounts of sheer, unexplained weirdness.

Also on this week's menu: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. Good grief. This crazy woman has, effectively, and with no sign of shame or remorse, re-written Bram Stoker's Dracula as one whale of a conspiracy theory, albeit in a 20th-century setting, and slightly upside down. Same multiple voices and points of identification; same strangely fragmentary narrative made up of letters, diary entries and oral accounts; same painstaking investigative process using the language and framework of science (or at least history, here) while unquestioningly accepting the reality of the supernatural. Where Stoker's hero meets the dreaded Count in the first chapter, however, and spends the rest of the book plotting his destruction, here the moment of confrontation with Ancient Evil is delayed interminably, until a rather pale and anticlimactic last chapter. I think these days we're all too postmodern about our Eeevil to actually be permitted more than a glimpse of it, lest we attempt to deconstruct. Like Stoker's novel, The Historian is a pretty gripping, schlocky and poppy sort of offering, although the scholarship also seems fairly genuine - lots of Vlad the Impaler and early Wallachian trade routes. Also lots of Romance, TM. Thoroughly enjoyable read - I devoured it in 24 hours - if somewhat inclining me to scratch my head and wonder why anyone would go to all that trouble to update a myth when the nineteenth-century original still works perfectly fine, thank you.

Shall stop the random book reviewing, lest witterers flee in droves. I had my over-literary English knuckles rapped last night, while braaing with jo&stv; I plead in mitigation that I was drowning the nausea in excess gin.
Jo (accusingly, after particularly verbose and slightly drunken outburst of pretention on my part): "Too much flighty language!"
Me: "I'm an English professional, what do you expect?"
Jo: "... Mercy!"

None, actually. None at all.

...and, having fielded five phone calls, one visit (with presents), one SMS, two blog comments and four e-mails before noon, I am feeling Loved, TM. Thanks for the good wishes, all. I realise, in fact, that probably the most important reason to have a cellphone again is so that people can contact me while I'm online on the dial-up, which I am way, way too often. Conversely, the weird cell reception blank spot in our house is worst in my study, for some reason, so the first 30 seconds of any call are confused and intermittant while I dash onto the patio.

As a general spread-the-love, I feel impelled to pass on a site recently recommended to me by Dylan (strictly for D&D players, alas, many 1st ed/3rd ed injokes). The Order of the Stick.

And, a quick correction. When counting up my book stash in yesterday's meme, I omitted an entire bookshelf (it's in the guestroom, camoflaged among the Evil Landlord's personal L-space). I also have about 150 books in my kiddies' collection. Total a lot closer to 2800, overall, and I think I've underestimated the ones in my office. Also, the most recent book I've read is, in fact, Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart, which I read last night in the bath. (Why, yes, I do read ridiculously fast and have ridiculously long baths). Almost unbearably fragile and delicately-written novel, necessitating the use of words such as poignant, melancholy, fractured and alienated in quantifying it. Also, the more I read Murakami, the less I am able to believe that I am actually capable of writing anything worthwhile at all. Damned depressing man.

Tonight, off to Hussar for Steak, TM; the small/expensive celebration, in sharp contradistinction to tomorrow's Large Raucous Party. Note to attendees tonight: there shall be no singing! None, I say!

Gosh-darned 'flu still lingering - currently giving me blocked ears that go "pop" every now and then, rather disconcerting. And still with the snuffling. But my brain generally seems to be emerging from the grip of the grippe, so to speak: I had enough coherence today to actually do some work, and spent a happy few hours noodling around with the paper on Tolkien and fan culture. Going well, apart from the fact that in moments of excitement the pile of books on fan culture will fall down behind my desk, necessitating swearing and scrabbling to retrieve the necessary tomes. Memo to self, must clear desk. Must also get a new screen pronto, this one had a ten-minute fit of fade-to-black this afternoon, producing a visual effect not unlike a black-and-white movie lit and photographed by a severely Impressionist director in a state of angst.

I have finally got around to tackling the huge pile of books I have borrowed from all four corners of Cape Town: yesterday, read Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Is it just me, or are all his main characters the same person? Weird sort of flat non-reactiveness to things, made all the more noticeable because the things that happen to Murakami characters are truly, truly odd. I have a sort of feeling that H-B Wonderland would have made more sense if I hadn't been 'flu-ridden, although, this being Murakami, maybe not. Strange sort of Escher-esque mental spaces, inside and outside each other at the same time. Odd book, and haunting me a tad. I think it was the unicorns.

On a not necessarily lighter note, although much more comprehensible one, I have now acquired books 5 to 7 of the Lemony Snicket series, once more crippling my long-suffering credit card. I didn't plan to, honest; I was in Exclusive in Cavendish for the excellent cause of meeting Stace and starmadeshadow, the purposes being to celebrate the former's birthday. Reason number umpty-whatever for not having kids: a night out with the grrlfriends becomes a High Treat, TM, necessitating organisation days in advance, and the connivance of the husband as baby-sitter. However, very nice dinner. Stace should have birthdays, or at least nights out, more often. I am full of chocolate cake and veal in lemon sauce, and shall trundle bedwards with a Lemony Snicket. It's not a bad life, really.

Well. That was ... lateral. Have just finished Kafka on the Shore, and have to confess myself a somewhat bewildered Murakami fan. He nearly lost me around the disembowelling cats bit, which I still think was a bit gratuitous, but I got over it. I can't actually work out how much of the off-the-wall surreality is Murakami, and how much of it is simply inscrutable orientalism - I am eternally fascinated by the extent to which Eastern assumptions about narrative are madly, madly different to Western. Have been trying to find the right word to describe his storytelling. Occlusive? oblique? also adumbrated, implicit, abstruse, recondite and elisive. Anyway. Colour me scouring Cape Town for more of his writing.

Positive vibes on the book-revision front. Nicest Ex-Supervisor in the World came round yesterday to collect the revised Carter chapter in order to check it for hopeless incoherence. She seems to think that the airy wave of the hand with which I am dismissing semiotic narrative criticism and all its horrible ilk, is legit. Am currently struggling with how to implement the changes required in the Thurber discussion, since currently reading through the chapter is causing me to wail "but I do that already!" at intervals,in response to the examiner and editor suggestions. Woe. But the acquisitions editor approves the Ursula Vernon cover, yay!

Cape Town continues hot. Sigh.