Dry (and miscellaneous) thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season...

I seem to have grown more thin-skinned in old age--not figuratively, but literally.  The tiniest scratch reacts like a cut, and with the anti-coagulant shots every day, the blood clots a fragment of a second later than it normally would have, leaving an ugly sore.  "Ugly" is the operative word.  Ah, vanity!

The last couple of days haven't been good.  Going out becomes problematic since once the stomach starts growling and cramping, there isn't a lot of time to find a bathroom.  And after several trips in a few hours' time, my energy level sags until I just want to sit or lie and stare blankly at mindless TV (of which, of course, there's no shortage).

Reading is good when my mind is working better.  For the last couple of years, I've read books on my Kindle.  When I retired and was faced with the problem of what to do with the hundreds of books in my office, realizing that there really wasn't space for most of them at home, Mohamed gave me a Kindle.  I thought I might miss holding actual paper and turning pages, but I almost never have; it holds 1500 books (and more can be archived) and takes up no shelf space.  I'd be happy to do a commercial for Kindle.  I did, however, have to add the 'almost' to the sentence before last.  I recently read the Alicia Stallings translation of Lucretius's "De Rerum Natura," or "On the Nature of Things."  The content aligned perfectly with my beliefs: no god, no final cause, the accidental "swerve."  The philosophy is both Epicurean (in the real sense of the term--not hedonism, but reasonable pleasure as the end of life) and, though less directly, Stoic.  There is less philosophy and more cosmology than I had expected; the notion of the swerve, which Stephen Greenblatt's book has made famous, is mentioned really only once, and that in the first book. 

What I found myself focusing on even more than the content (I nodded a lot in agreement) was the translation, which was very widely praised.  Stallings chose to use 14-syllable rhymed couplets, and the Kindle made a mess of the lines, which were too long to fit on one line on the screen, and so were carried over to the next line or two with no consistency in the margins.  That made the reading experience confusing, so perhaps I"m being unfair to Stallings, but I was frequently irritated by her translation, especially her rhyming.  She consistently produced rhymes like 'city' with 'mediocrity,' which isn't a rhyme at all.  With 28 syllables to play with, I thought she could have been more inventive.  Mine is a minority opinion.

Next came three of David Lodge's academic satires: Changing Place, Nice Work, and Small World.  One of the pleasures of teaching at Washburn for so long was that I often got to create one-time courses, and I always wanted to do a seminar about satires of academia (Randall Jarrell's Pictures from  an Institution, Malamud's A New Life, Smiley's Moo--there's no shortage).  I'd read all three Lodge novels a couple of times before, but they all held up again and provided good laughs.  It is, however, probably a good thing that I never did the seminar, since what seems hilarious to someone who has spent 45 years in English departments would probably be mildly humorous for one novel or so to students and then become baffling and dry.

At the moment, I'm re-reading Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of, which was the first book I ever read on my Kindle.  It's his mediation on religion and death.  Although I usually like his work a lot, I remember feeling disappointed by the book when I first read it, especially as he was only middle-aged and in good health; his motivation for writing the book seemed strained.  But that was before my cancer, so perhaps I'll have a different perspective on his thoughts now.