uncategorical

English Litritcher

My full-time temp job continues but it leaves me with essentially no spare time whatsoever, so I have had to choose between my blog and my jog. I chose the jog because if I don’t do it now I never will. I have been running about 18 miles a week for the past two months or so. So far I have only lost one pound but I think that I shall begin shedding more soon enough. It’s surprising how long it takes for the body to adjust to daily exercise if you haven’t been doing it for twenty years.

In between calls, I have been reading online. The first book that I finished was The American Senator by Anthony Trollope (Trollope is like Philippines, no matter how many times I look it up I still can’t remember how to spell it). Trollope reminds me a bit of Seinfeld in the sense that he generally wrote about nothing, but his work is filled with so many insightful little observations about human nature that one just never gets tired of it. There is a constant flow of entertainment. The underlying theme seems to be a sort of micro-hubris – the individual’s constant tendency to grasp for things that are just a little too far out of reach. Trollope is also massively cynical. Another repeating theme, which is a sort of sub-theme of the first, is the counterproductive effects of ill-conceived attempts at reform.

I imagine that I would be rather contented for a decade or two if I could sit on a deckchair on a warm beach somewhere with two CD players and an endless supply of coffee and various forms of alcohol. I would have the complete Vivaldi concertos at my left and the works of Trollope on CD at my right and I would alternate between the two. Occasionally, I might also take a dip in the sea.

After the American Senator, which, incidentally, was the follow up to The Way We Live Now and would make perfect Masterpiece Theater material, I moved on to The Scarlet Letter, which I had never read. After that I decided that it would be less stressful to confine myself to short stories because I would not feel such intense pressure to get through them and would therefore perhaps not find the continuous interruptions of the customers quite so irksome. I began reading Chekhov. I heartily recommend this site for your workplace litritcher needs.

On the way to and from work, I am currently listening to Frederick Davidson reading the second half of Dombey and Son. I wrote about part one on my previous blog. Dickens of course is the original working class hero and a towering genius, regardless of what anyone says. The construction of Dombey and Son in particular has a sort of geometric elegance about the way its numerous memorable characters come and go and reappear in unexpected ways. The central figure of the novel seems to be the wonderfully evil Mr. Carker. Davidson does a wonderful job of recreating the speech forms of the various cast members, performing a task that may no longer be possible when another generation or two increases the distance between the Victorian age and our own.

At lunchtime, I’m slowly working through stories by one of America’s finest writers, O Henry. It seems to me that if you drew a line from Mark Twain to Jack Kerouac, O Henry would be located pretty much exactly in the middle between the two. His form was an unusual one: the very short story. Some of his tales are reminiscent of Aesop’s fables, others are more like slices of life in the big city or out on the plains, and a few are essentially just extended jokes. It seems to me that most all of his stories are suitable, indeed virtually ideal, for older children and teen-agers as well as adults. O Henry’s world is unmistakeably Rockwellian, but with an added twist of outlaw morality that often enables the good guys and the bad guys to switch roles at the drop of a hat.

In sum, I now have almost no free time at all, but I am getting more reading done than ever before.

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