Family Day
Cold, raining, and of course the Library's closed and the cafe's are overflowing, the best you can hope to do is to rent a table for twenty or so minutes.
To stay longer would be rude, there's always someone hovering nearby checking the status of your coffee, that jealous green eye-on-your-table, "here, let me help you with that..."...
SO, open the laptop and do some eavesdropping.
There's an older couple beside me, 60's I'm guessing, the man is very earnestly clutching his dates hands, she's catching my eye, not quite an eye-roll or "rescue me" but...listening to their conversation, it's a first date...!!!? The conversation gives it away, they don't know each other, not at all. Then why, I'm wondering, is he clutching her hands over the end of the table? They must have met on one of those dating sites...."My Time" or "Our Time" or "Frisky Seniors" for divorcees & widows making merry, apparently these are the days my friend, these are the days, I can believe it looking at them but am so on the down-low that there's been no time to partake, and this hostage-taking happening at the table next to me, it's not inspiring...not at all.
The date ends, my coffee's finished, wait until they leave before folding up the laptop and disappearing. Sundays, Days off, at the moment they're the worst. Soon enough there will be none...
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The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
Reading Vasily Aksyonov's "The Burn" - which places it's comic heroes in a dystopian society (early 70's Russia), - a relentless drunken stream-of-consciousness tirade that pits the narrator - and his American friend "Patrick Thunderjet" - against the State, the World, and recalls me to reread "The Master and Margarita".
I will come back to "The Burn" in another review, I promise.
Now this is a book that I actively proselytize, along with "Confederacy of Dunces", "Lolita", and "The Discovery of New Spain", Herodotus, a few dozen others, that I place joyfully in another's hands to have them read and discuss, only to discover the book again not a day later in a thrift shop or curbside library.
So goes literacy.
In any event, while looking for it online I came across this translation:
Online Translation: https://www.weblitera.com/book/?id=205&lng=1
Which I took a few hours to reread. I'm not certain this is a translation by either Mira Ginsberg or Michael Glenny, but - aside from typos, this was not so bad. And yet again I found myself - after the Ball - both laughing and crying on the same page, the circumstance, characters, the details - forgotten, or perhaps never in the editions I recalled.
Anyways, a joy once again.
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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
n. a wistful omen of the first sign of autumn—a subtle coolness in the shadows, a rustling of dead leaves abandoned on the sidewalk, or a long skein of geese sweeping over your head like the second hand of a clock.
n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if no time had passed since you last saw each other.
Link: https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/
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White Noise & A Catastrophic Event
I mean, barely a month out on Netflix and then there's the train derailment in Ohio. And - while the book is some 40 years old (??), the movie foreshadows the - quite literal - Catastrophic Event - in Ohio - and not only are the parallels uncanny extras from the movie were actually evacuated from their homes for this. Life imitating art?
Since when - as the news has veered away from the shooting down of garbage bags, weather balloons, it's now ALL train derailments.
Sadly, all of this has been building for quite a while now and can't be in the least bit seen as a surprise, what is surprising is the inadequacy of the response and the dearth of good advice/damage control at ground level. Also extraordinarily well predicted...
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