These January nights are spooky, filled with the dark-shrouded ghosts of Thursdays long gone. Are Thursdays more haunted than other nights? Is it due to a bizarre connection to the pizza chef strikes of three hundred years ago? Was there pizza three hundred years ago?
Contrary to the opinions of many of my students' parents, January seems rather a cheery month to this writer. The daylight begins to stretch out, no major events or plans need to be made, and nothing is looming. It's a very free month, and very liberating. It feels good. It's probably just another effect of the ghosts. They count amongst their number the shade of Bakus Jorgenson, who invented the moustache, and that of his wife Ixa, who invented the divorce. The two events may not have been entirely unrelated...
It's also a very nice month to get your reading done, with all those hours of darkness with nothing more to do. At the moment, after much procrastination, my reading has finally gotten back to Mark Twain's 'Joan Of Arc', and Freud's 'Jokes And Their Relation To The Unconscious'. Even in translation, Freud was a great writer. Did he translate it himself, perhaps? No, I suspect some assistance was invoked, based on no provocation whatsoever. Despite being wonderful texts, I still somehow end up reading other books endlessly. 'Joan of Arc' is a legitimately wonderful novel, but the foreknowledge of her end is quite a deterrent to keeping on with the book, despite how well Twain manages the foreshadowing. We'll get to it eventually here at the QM, if I can just glue myself to the novel and not be distracted by other things... Like 'Conan' or 'Brigadier Gerard', or some mathematical proofs that need to be worked out for tutoring purposes.
The New Year jigsaw puzzle has been completed, which means it's time to... bring out more jigsaw puzzles. They are wonderful things to do, a beautiful evocation of order from chaos.
Jigsaw season continues... Jigsaws are wonderful... Jigsaws are the future...
O.
No comments:
Post a Comment