Looking back over the last couple of years, I've noted that my blogging tends to slow down in October and November. And it looks like it's happening again. I've thought about some topics for posts. I even considered commenting on the elections, but these things come and go and in a few months are soon forgotten as nothing much really changes. We seem to have been deluded by all the media chatter into thinking that something is always going on, but so far as I can tell it isn't.
But that reminds me of another thing I was thinking about this morning as I was reading my morning paper. That's it. I was reading my morning paper while I was eating breakfast, something I've been doing for years now, and continue doing even though it's anachronistic and seemingly pointless. It's certainly unnecessary, since I generally also check the New York Times online every evening, so any real news has already been reported. But then there is the local news. Where else am I going to catch up on what's happening here in Austin? So I guess that's the attraction. Of course, the Austin American-Statesman does have an online version, which I used to consult before I moved back to Texas, but it's not a very appealing app. -- way too busy and hard to navigate or find anything. So far the New York Times has been very satisfying online, and while I still enjoy reading the Sunday Times on paper, especially the magazine and book review, I'm content to get the rest of my news in electronic form. And if that's true for someone like me, I don't expect newspapers as papers will be around much longer.
Well, that's about all I've got. I've been continuing my reading at a good pace. I just completed Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man (1953) and Peter Ackroyd's English Music (1992), both of which were enjoyable. I've also been reading Bester's stories, some of which I know I read when I was a kid just discovering science fiction, but it's been so long I've forgotten most of that stuff. I just remember really enjoying all those books I used to get in the Science Fiction Book Club. I think it was the first book club I ever joined. The Demolished Man is not really science fiction, although it is set in the future. It's more a police procedural cum noir detective story, with a police inspector who can read minds. But Bester can really come up with some imaginative twists and turns, and a future where the police can read minds no longer sounds all that far fetched.
English Music is a bit tedious. Very quickly one learns that Ackroyd is going to alternate chapters of the story narrative, which involves a boy (Timothy Harcombe) and his father who appear to have the gift of healing, and chapters of dream narrative in which the boy slips into the works of English authors, composers, and artists. Variously he inhabits the worlds of Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle, Daniel Defoe, William Byrd, William Hogarth and then a series of English painters. There's also an entire chapter, written in the style of William Blake, celebrating all of English poetry, and a final homage to the Arthurian saga, with a nod in the direction of T.S. Eliot. The reader can hardly escape recognizing that Ackroyd is a formidable literary scholar and accomplished biographer; he's also an adept mimic of other writers (something I noted in Chatterton as well). It's amusing, and fun to chase all the references and allusions, but after a while I had the feeling I was back in graduate school. I'm not sure what I think. Should I try reading Hawksmoor (1985), which is considered his best novel? Or should I return to my British-Writing-Between-the-Wars project? Or perhaps I should take up more of the postwar British fiction I always enjoyed so much.
More to follow as the spirit moves me.
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